


Heavy Metal

by JackTheBard



Category: RWBY
Genre: But you get my point, F/M, Gen, LARP Au, based on personal experience, i mean not the sex bit, metal concert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2018-10-20 08:51:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10659144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackTheBard/pseuds/JackTheBard
Summary: (Set in an AU where the plot of RWBY is a LARP and the characters are the players)Jaune is getting ready to settle in for a nice, normal Friday night when a message from Nora beeps on his phone, informing him to put on a pair of steel-toed boots and a whole lot of black. Less than fifteen minutes later, Nora, Ren, and Pyrrha are dragging him to his first metal concert, and to all the insanity that is involved therein.





	1. Chapter 1

Friday nights are generally reserved for certain pastimes. Some people choose to go out and party. Some prefer to stay indoors and relax with a good book, maybe a game or a movie, cozying up to a loved one before a night of snuggles or heated passion. Jaune found himself in the solitary version of the second, settling in to watch _Hitch_ for what seemed like the fiftieth time in the past year when he felt his phone buzz.

The message was from “Nora V.”

A simple enough name, innocuous in the fact that it didn’t draw attention in undue ways. Unfortunately, his name in her phone was probably something along the lines of “Sord…” or “Burned Steak Bitch”.

You ruin dinner one time, and it sticks with you for the rest of your life.

“Sup, fucknuts,” the message read, “Doin anything tonight?”

Jaune rolled his eyes at the affectionate insults that Nora threw his way and responded, “No. Just watching _Hitch_ again.”

The response was almost immediate, “Jesus tittyfuckin shitchrist Jaune you’ve seen that movie like 30 times this month already.”

“I really like it, okay?”

“And he doesn’t deny it. Anything else?”

“No, just the movie.”

“Good. See you in 15,” Nora said, and Jaune paused at the instructions that followed, “Wear your army boots, a black shirt, and be prepared for some shit.”

What followed was him following through with the instructions while he still tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Nora had this strange way of compelling people to do what she wanted even if they didn’t know they wanted to do it. All in all, she came across as a very small girl that appeared to be holding a very large hammer and an expression on her face that said “try me. I dare you.”

“What’s going on?”

“Are you getting ready?”

“No,” he lied, “What’s going on.”

“Metal concert. We had an extra ticket.”

That made Jaune stop dead in his tracks. “Metal?!” he asked in the most exasperated text-based tone he could muster, “Don’t people die at those?”

“Relax, Jaune. More people died at Woodstock than at all the metal concerts and festivals I’ve been to combined.”

“Yeah, but that was Woodstock,” Jaune said, knowing his argument was as flimsy as they got. “There were drugs there.”

“You think that metalheads don’t do drugs?”

“I think you don’t,” Jaune responded as he laced his boots up, making sure they were nice and tight just like his father had taught him.

“You think right. Ren has been known to partake in a little toke from time to time. Same with Pyrrha. Oh, by the way, she’s going to be wearing leather.”

That made Jaune pause, the ramifications running through his head as he pondered all of the various contexts that one could feasibly wear leather in.

“Like… biker leather or…” He didn’t want to say “BDSM leather” because, then, Nora would never let him live it down.

“You’ll see~” Nora responded teasingly. She followed it up with a message that said, “She’s on her way up now.”

Damn.

It was one of those unspoken things that tended to resonate between a pair of people. His friend Ruby’s sister Yang commented about how he had a subconscious love for Pyrrha that came through in their body language towards one another, and that she was already reciprocating it. Yang claimed that he was dense as a black hole and that he needed to start paying attention to the people around him.

She was right about him not having the finest observational skills when people were concerned, so he followed Yang’s advice and started paying a little attention.

And he found that she was, frustratingly, correct. Pyrrha acted a lot differently around him than she did anyone else. The typically cool, collected, and calm woman behaved like a completely different person around him. Whenever he was present, she tended to be just as dorky, clumsy, and awkward as he was. He had thought it was just her being strange and cutting loose around her closest friends, but that changed when she tripped over her own feet.

Pyrrha Nikos. Tripping over her own feet. To quote _The Princess Bride_ : “Inconceivable!”

Jaune was still rummaging through his shirt drawer searching for something in black (he had mainly blues, whites, a couple of browns), when he heard a knock at the door.

“It’s open,” he called before realizing his mistake. Pyrrha was going to walk into his apartment while he was shirtless. It was going to be an awkward-a-palooza.

Here is what generally happens when someone likes a person and they walk in on the subject of their affections half-naked. One: That pause where the accidental pervert realizes what exactly is going on, and proceeds to go stiff as a board.

Two: There is an awkward moment where both parties take in the full gravity of the situation and stare at one another in a way that is not dissimilar to a deer being blasted with headlights. The accidental pervert in this case may wind up “enjoying the view”.

Three, Option A: The accidental pervert, finally snapping back to reality, apologizes and turns away, giving the other person the privacy they desired in the first place.

Three, Option B: The other person tries to cover themselves up and regain at least a semblance of their missing modesty, demanding that the accidental pervert leave so they can finish getting dressed. What usually follows in this case is an incredible sense of flusteredness, and the accidental pervert leaving while stammering out apologies about how sorry they are. Objects may be thrown in this particular case.

It should also be noted that Three A usually occurs when a woman walks in on someone they are attracted to, and that Three B usually occurs when a man walks in on someone that they’re attracted to.

Step one went as it should, with Pyrrha staring at Jaune and turning rigid. Her hands clenched into fists at her sides, and she stood up as straight as she possibly could. Her eyes widened, and Jaune kept his back turned to her. In a breach of standard trope, Pyrrha actually spoke up before step Three.

“Hi.”

Jaune jolted, holding a black t-shirt with a pink bunny on it in his hands. He turned around, the embarrassing article of clothing clutched in his fingers as he stared at Pyrrha. Cue step two.

They both paused, and there was a moment where they took each other in. Pyrrha’s gaze leapt from the incredibly adorable t-shirt (she had to stifle a laugh) to Jaune’s bare chest. While the tradition of male beauty tends to focus on being perfectly manscaped with underwear-model abs, Pyrrha found Jaune appealing simply because he was… well, normal.

That wasn’t to say that he wasn’t muscular. Years of working in construction had turned him as hard as wood, and the past eighteen months of LARPing with Pyrrha, Ren, Nora, and a few of their other friends had given him the muscle tone to make him look like a halfway point between blacksmith and swordfighter.

Jaune, on the other hand, found himself staring quite intently at not just Pyrrha, but her choice of outfit. As a contrast to her usual summer tank top and shorts combo (you would never guess that she was a master in five different martial arts disciplines based on her choice in outfit), she wore a pair of very large, very baggy black pants that flared out towards the bottom. Jaune had never seen so much metal embedded into so much cloth.

Something that non-metal-concert-goers don’t tend to take into consideration when it comes to dressing for a metal concert is that there is quite an excessive amount of the stuff in the outfits themselves. Pyrrha’s pants alone contained what was probably at least three pounds of steel in the form of studs, chains, and zippers that didn’t really seem to go to any pockets in particular. Some people would call all of these additions “unnecessary” or “ridiculous”.

Some people are stupid. 

If the point is to look as badass and hardcore as possible, then all of the extra shiny bits that could probably be used to kill a man in increasingly creative ways were completely, totally, and utterly necessary for completing the look of pants that would probably earn a nod of approval from a post-dystopian cyberpunk anti-hero. This is, of course, assuming that post-dystopian cyberpunk anti-heroes did nods of approval in the first place.

The rest of Pyrrha’s outfit was no less impressive, and infinitely more made up of rather impressive bits of leather. While the pants would not have seemed out of place in a post-dystopian cyberpunk alternate timeline, her vest looked like the bastard love child of The Matrix and a derelict steampunk museum. Buttons, straps, buckles, and a couple of studs here and there served to distract and conceal a single long zipper that went up the middle of the front of the vest (which, to be honest, seemed to be the only necessary piece of metal on the whole thing).

Finishing the look were leather cuffs, almost like bracers, strapped to each wrist, tooled with designs that Jaune couldn’t really make out in the brief moment that he took in her outfit. His gaze flicked up to her face after a fashion to see that her cherry red hair and emerald green eyes were accentuated by lipstick as black as midnight and winged eyeliner that was sharp enough to cut a man’s throat if she so desired. Her firey mane of hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, banded with several silver rings to keep it under control and (possibly) serve as a makeshift whip if someone decided to piss her off.

Jaune took all of this in over the course of a few seconds before Pyrrha took option A of step Three, and stammered out an apology before turning around and stepping out of Jaune’s line of sight.

“Sorry,” she said, her face turning a shade of crimson embarrassment that rivaled her hair, and stepped just outside the doorway to Jaune’s room.

Jaune blinked a couple of times, realizing just how drastically different she looked compared to any outfit he had ever seen her wear before. He turned back to his shirt drawer.

“So,” Pyrrha asked, that same lilting quality to her voice that seemed kind, teasing, and loving all at the same time seemed especially apparent now, “Are you planning on wearing the pink bunny shirt to the event full of people that look like they have never even considered ‘pink’ exists?”

Jaune felt heat creeping up his neck as he stuffed the shirt back into the drawer and started rummaging around for another. Eventually, he discovered a black shirt that read “Dark Creature of Unspeakable Evil” in red print so dark that it would blend in with the background in dim light. Unfortunately, the writing of “Dark” made it look like “Dork,” but either would work as far as his friends were concerned. He threw it on, tucking it into his pants, then deciding against it and untucking it so he didn’t look like a total square. “No. It was just what I happened to be holding when you came in.”

“You invited me in,” Pyrrha responded.

“Yeah, but you didn’t have to come in and stare at the embarrassing stuff I had in my shirt drawer!” Jaune said in exasperation, prompting a laugh from his friend. It sounded like bells chiming quietly in the cool air of autumn, and he felt his heart do that stupid thing where it twisted into a couple of knots, somersaulted, and then decided that gymnastics wasn’t its career of choice before flopping down on the couch to do something more productive like screaming into a pillow.

“How could I possibly resist?” Pyrrha asked as Jaune came out. She looked up at his face with a warm smile, then took a step back to give his outfit an appraising look. “It’ll work. You may feel a little underdressed compared to Nora and Ren, but that’s alright. We just want you to have a good time.”

“I already feel underdressed with you in the room,” Jaune said with a barking laugh. Here she was, looking ready to take on an oppressive dystopian regime with nothing but an incredibly out-of-date PDA and a hatchet, and he was just looking like an average dude.

“Oh, this? My outfit’s a little bit… bland compared to some of the others that you’re going to see tonight,” Pyrrha admitted with a shrug, glancing down at her bracers to make sure they were in place. “Nora’s and Ren’s are a lot more wild than mine, if I’m going to be honest.”

That made Jaune pause in his tracks as he followed Pyrrha to the door. “They’re what.”

“Their outfits are a little bit crazier than mine,” Pyrrha said with a laugh at Jaune’s confusion, “Nora tends to a more Viking perspective when it comes to her appreciation of metal, while Ren is a little more industrial in taste. It reflects in their clothing.”

“Yeah, I’m going to pretend I understood what you just said,” Jaune responded, finally forcing himself out of his apartment and locking it up behind him, “I’m going to smile and nod and pretend that those descriptions made sense when I see Ren and Nora in person.”

Pyrrha let out a laugh and made her way towards the stairs rather than the elevator. She didn’t stay in as good of shape as she did by taking the lazy (and usually longer) way out. Besides, she and Jaune were young and spry, and he was only on the third floor. They could afford to take the stairs.

But as they came out of the stairwell, Jaune felt his throat tighten up as he saw one of the people standing in front of the elevator. There were three people waiting for the doors to open. Two of them were a lovely middle-aged couple that Jaune had met once or twice. They lived on the seventh floor, and looked rather exhausted, so he couldn’t find any room in his heart to fault them for taking the box all the way up.

The other, however, was his octogenarian neighbor, Ms. Sanders.

Ms. Sanders was one of those people that was born at the tail end of the second world war, lived through the Sixties, Civil Rights Movement, and the start of the Digital Age, and yet still managed to be a card-carrying member of the Fashion Police. What’s worse, she managed to speak volumes with a single gaze that had stared down three generations of her own bloodline, and had only gotten better with time.

Of course, she was also very sweet on Jaune because he had helped her youngest son move a sofa into her apartment when nobody else was available, so she had a little bit of a soft spot for the Arc boy.

“Jaune!” she said the second she saw him step out of the stairwell. Once Pyrrha followed him out, however, he felt the air turn cold as Antarctic winter and the dentured smile fall off her face like she was trying to rewind time and stuff the utterance of his name back in her mouth.

Nevertheless, Jaune decided that he would try to be cordial.

“Hey, Ms. Sanders,” Jaune said with the most polite and neighborly smile he could muster. Between his nerves about the upcoming concert and his anxiety about running into his next-door neighbor with Pyrrha standing right behind him, looking like a post-apocalyptic war goddess, he was getting an increasing feeling that his apartment would be “forgotten” when Ms. Sanders did her rounds with the Christmas baked goods this year. That would sting quite a bit more than a slap to the face, since she was so sweet when she wasn’t judging people for superficial things such as manner of dress.

Ms. Sanders gave him that look. The one that asked him what he was doing with his life and whether or not he would find a nice girl to settle down with and have a wonderful family. “You could really have a wonderful family,” the gaze seemed to say, “You just need to find the right girl, and this is definitely not the right girl.”

Jaune still tried to remain cordial, despite the fact that he felt his sins crawling up the back of his neck. “So, Ms. Sanders, is there anything that you need a hand with coming up? I know that you were talking about needing to rearrange your living room the other day. I can free up some time tomorrow, if you’re still on board to do that.”

As if the look had never existed, on Ms. Sanders’ face or anyone else’s, the expression disappeared, whisked away by a brief wind of joy.

“Oh, that would be wonderful, Jaune. I appreciate it a lot. I was planning on asking Maxwell,” that would be her youngest son, “swing by to take care of it yesterday or today, but he was just so busy with his own family. He and his wife are getting ready for their fifteenth wedding anniversary, you know. They’re going on a trip to Hawaii.”

“I did not,” Jaune said with a wide smile, genuinely excited for her to hold yet another one of her grandchildren in her arms, “I wish them the best of luck. I have to go, but I’ll swing by tomorrow at about lunchtime. If you’d like, I could bring something for you as well.”

“Oh, Jaune,” Ms. Sanders said, sweet as honey, “I’ll fix up something for you, don’t you worry.” She glanced around and beckoned for Jaune to lean in close. He obliged her.

“Just be careful around roughneck types like the one behind you. She’s bad news. I’d hate to see you hurt.”

Jaune pulled away and forced a smile. He wanted to call Ms. Sanders out right then and there, but restrained himself for a number of reasons.

1\. Ms. Sanders is a sweet lady despite her faults, and didn’t deserve that kind of treatment.  
2\. He would seem like quite the asshole shit-talking a sweet old lady in the apartment building lobby.  
3\. Ren, Nora, and Pyrrha were waiting on him and the argument would just hold them up longer. Nora, more than anyone else, was not a patient woman.  
As such, Jaune turned towards the doorway where Pyrrha already waited, and he spied a modest sedan waiting in the turn-in for the apartment building. He quickly escaped Ms. Sanders’ trademarked Judgement Sphere, and made his way over to the car.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaune's apprehensions about Metalheads are somewhat unfounded. Pyrrha helps him unwind while Nora and Ren make a couple of new friends.

Ren’s vehicle could be described as innocuous on the best of days, and downright bland on the worst. It made sure that the contents of the vehicle were not something that would be noticed, no matter the situation. Even if a clown was behind the wheel of this car, blasting the “Thomas the Tank Engine” theme at full volume, people would tend to look the other way from the car simply because of how uninteresting it was.

Jaune figured that this would be in their favor tonight. He pulled open the front passenger side for Pyrrha and ducked into the back passenger seat just in case Ms. Sanders got a little curious, and had to stop to take in the scene in its entirety.

When he and Pyrrha buckled themselves in, there was a particularly thrash-worthy drum solo (or rather, it would be thrash-worthy, if Jaune was in a thrashing mood) playing through the car’s speakers, presumably to set the mood.

Nora looked like she was about to charge into battle. It wasn’t so much her outfit that made it seem that way. She had a plain black long-sleeved shirt on, as well as black jeans and a pair of combat boots much like Jaune’s own. What made her seem so combat ready was her choice of accessories. 

Over the normal clothing that would not be too out of place under a bridge in the inner city, she wore a shirt of chainmail and a black belt with a buckle that looked like it was forged out of the heart of a meteor. Over the chainmail was a set of pauldrons that strapped across her chest and under her arms, moving with that quiet clank of metal on metal as she moved underneath them. They were etched with images of angelic wings and drinking horns, befitting a woman whose last name was “Valkyrie”.

Down her arms, a pair of steel vambraces, simple and brutal in design, extended over the backs of her hands, preventing her from bending her wrist back, but making her backhand prowess that much more mighty. Carved into the armor, rather than etched, were depictions of a short-handled hammer, ready to sunder mountains and call thunderstorms with but a word. If nothing else, Nora took her Thor imagery very seriously.

On her lower body, the end of her chainmail shirt flared out over the tops of her thighs like an incredibly short metal skirt, and her boots were covered by a pair of greaves that came up to her knees, etched with the heads of dragons that breathed tongues of flame down to the sabatons that provided even more protection for the toes of her boots.

To finish it all off, a smearing of bright blue woad paint diagonally across her face made her look like a strange hybrid between a Viking, a Scottish Highlander, and a princess with strawberry-blonde hair.

Jaune, of course, found some room to comment.

“No gauntlets? I feel like you’re not worried enough about your fingers,” he said as Ren pulled onto the main road just outside of the apartment building.

“Nah,” Nora said, waving him off and leaning back in her seat, “I loaned those to Ren.”

“Yup,” Ren confirmed in a voice that was deeper and much more distorted than his own. Jaune looked up to the driver’s seat and saw Ren raise a hand that was covered in joints of shining steel, the fingers coming to points with the talons on the end. “Nora, could you give him his ticket? It’ll be pointless to drag him out and about like this if he’s not going to be able to get through the door.”

“Oh!” Nora said, reaching under one of her pauldrons and pulling out a heavily creased (and slightly sweat-dampened) piece of paper. “As long as they can scan the bar code, you should be fine,” she said, as she handed it over to Jaune.

“And if they can’t?” Jaune asked, a little wary.

“Eh, they’ll probably let you in anyway. I have the digital copy on my phone.”

“Delightful,” Jaune said as he realized that his last chance of escaping this outing was dead and gone. “So who are we going to see?”

“The band is called Sabaton,” Ren explained as he pointed at the CD player, “Swedish band, draws a lot of influence from World War Two stories. They’re a sort of Power/Heavy metal, not unlike classic Metallica, but with a much more European sound. They’re a bunch of history buffs that tell the story of World War Two from the German perspective, but without all the Nazi propaganda.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You just said it’s the German side of the World War Two story, but without the Nazi part. How is there not a Nazi part to all this?!” He knew he probably sounded the same way that those detectives do on TV shows when they’re talking to the tech guys, demanding that they “speak English, god dammit!”

Nora frowned at him and said, “One of their big songs laments about the persecution of the Jewish people of Germany and the Holocaust, treating it as the horrible crime against humanity and absolute tragedy that it was. A lot of their power ballads focus more on great battles during the wars, like the ill-fated German invasion of Russia. She started bouncing up and down in her seat, causing her chainmail to clink and her plates to clatter, “They’re one of my favorites! Great stuff to mosh to!”

“Oh, no no no,” Jaune said, holding up a finger and waggling it at her, “I am NOT getting in a mosh pit.”

Pyrrha, surprisingly, did not act as the voice of reason in this situation, “Jaune, I’m afraid you are.”

“I’m what.”

“You’re going to be in a mosh pit. I’m afraid that’s just how it is. You’re going to your first metal concert, so you have to pop your cherry.”

Jaune swallowed nervously. There was no escape from pain tonight, it would seem.

“It’s alright, Jaune! It’s a lot of fun. Just remember these basic rules: Elbows in, arms up, don’t grope, don’t fight. Simple.”

“Isn’t the whole point to fight, though?” Jaune asked. From what he’d seen about mosh pits, fights broke out in them all the time.

“Noooooo,” Nora said, holding up a hand and stopping him before he proceeded any further. “The point is to get the lead out. Enjoy the music with a touch of violence. You’ve got a problem with someone, take it up with them outside of the pit. What I mean by ‘don’t fight’ is ‘don’t fight one person in particular.’”

“Because that makes total sense,” Jaune said.

“It does, doesn’t it?”

Jaune let the statement slide and his mind wander. His thoughts stray towards the front of the car, where he can catch Pyrrha’s profile in the side-view mirror, but only just barely. The windows are rolled down, and the bright moon in clear sky casts a splash of silver light across her fair cheek, making her skin seem pale, almost translucent. Goddesslike.

He found himself hypnotized by the visage captured in the rain-spot-spattered mirror, a work that would be fitting of a renaissance master if it were on canvas, and is snapped out of his reverie by a buzzing in his pocket.

He almost yelped, but catches himself before he does. Even so, he jumped, prompting a snicker from Nora before he checks the message.

Nora V.: daydreamin pretty hard there, Jaune.

He bit his tongue and let his fingers do the talking, knowing that there’s a rather long and tedious conversation that needs to be had here.

Jaune A.: Shut your fuck.  
Nora V.: ooooooh. such language. admiring the view, there?  
Jaune A.: See above: Shut your fuck.  
Nora V.: don’t be such a spoilsport.  
Jaune A.: Or you’ll what?  
Nora V.: it’s not what I’ll do.  
Nora V.: it’s what I’ve already done.

Jaune felt his heart seize up in his throat, threatening to strangle him so he doesn’t have to deal with the embarrassment of the moment, before he finally engaged Nora again.

Jaune A.: What could you have possibly done.  
Nora V.: told her how you feel.  
Nora V.: yakno. nothin big.

He found his eyes snapping away from the screen and locking onto Nora’s devilish grin. She had been waiting for this much since she sent the first message hinting at her devious intentions. Jaune fumed.

Jaune A.: WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU TELL HER THAT  
Nora V.: so you do like her.  
Jaune A.: I never said that.  
Nora V.: but you’re insinuatin it.  
Jaune A.: Stop.  
Nora V.: you liiiiiiiiiike her.  
Jaune A.: We’re just friends. You know this.  
Nora V.: riiiiiiiight.

The extension of the letter “I” was getting on Jaune’s nerves more than anything else at this point, so he had to resort to drastic measures. He decided to try and beat her at her own game.

Jaune A.: Hoooooooooooow do you knoooooooooooow hoooooooooow I feeeeeeeeeeeel?  
Nora V.: ok not gonna lie that just looks stupid.

He was caught.

Jaune A.: Can’t argue with that.  
Nora V.: but to answer your question: it’s how you look at her.  
Jaune A.: ?  
Nora V.: bruh  
Nora V.: I ain’t seen a dude more sad to stare at a girl than when Ren went to the pound and couldn’t adopt all of the puppies in this one litter because he could only take two.  
Jaune A.: you mean Mílo and Akoúo? Haven’t you had them for like… 3 years now?  
Nora V.: holy fuck how did you do the accents?  
Jaune A.: Just hold down the letter.  
Nora V.: Mý põíñt éxàctlý.  
Jaune A.: That looks stupid too.  
Nora V.: ok can’t argue there.  
Jaune A.: But you mean to say you haven’t seen anyone as pathetic looking as me right now since Ren adopted your dogs?  
Nora V.: yes.

Jaune stared at her and frowned with such intensity that it could be seen even when the car wasn’t passing under a street lamp.

Jaune A.: So you think that me being pathetic af is going to help my case?  
Nora V.: change your britches Jaune  
Nora V.: I didn’t tell her

That made him pause for a moment, staring up at Nora, who wore a poker face that even the most seasoned poker veteran wouldn’t be able to see through.

Jaune A.: So what was the point  
Nora V.: 2 c how u reacted  
Jaune A.: You’re a fucking sadist  
Nora V.: ye I kno  
Jaune A.: Why do I get the feeling that you’re going to murder someone tonight just because the concert will give you plausible deniability?

Across the car, Nora shrugged audibly. Granted, this wasn’t a particularly difficult task, due to the fact that she was wearing a rather impressive set of plate-mail armor across her shoulders and collarbones. Luckily for Jaune, Nora, and their conversation in general, it just sounded (to Ren and Pyrrha, at least), like she was shifting her weight to a more comfortable position in the back of the car.

Even though he knew that the secret was safe between the two of them, Jaune couldn’t help but stare coldly at Nora, a scowl on his lips, just out of sight of either of the other riders. 

It wasn’t long after that Ren took an exit to a slightly traffic-clogged bypass, a meandering road that led to a vast, open field. Off in the distance, one could see something that vaguely resembled a stage, occasionally illuminated by flamethrowers.

Jaune found himself staring at that distant stage-like-thing with an increasing sense of confusion and apprehension, because it only vaguely resembled a stage in the same way that an ostrich vaguely resembles a bird. You know an ostrich is a bird. It can’t be anything else because it doesn’t look like anything else. It has a beak and feathers, therefore it must be a bird. But god damn if it doesn’t make your head tilt for a moment even if you have an idea what the hell it is.

Ren pulled into a parking lot that was growing increasingly crowded with cars that appeared to be cut from the same unassuming sheets of metal that Ren’s was, with the occasional ice cream truck, meat wagon, and pick-up with a flatbed full of dudes dressed in black with very long hair.

Needless to say, there was an increasing sense of strangeness that dominated Jaune’s thoughts.

“Jaune, close your mouth or something will fly in,” Nora said, a grin on her face as if she was returning to a loving home for the first time in ten years.

Jaune, of course, snapped his mouth shut and the click of his teeth caused Pyrrha to giggle in the front seat. “What’s got you gaping, Jaune?” Pyrrha asked, knowing that he was more afraid than excited.

“There’s… ice cream trucks.”

Nora’s gaze snapped up and she grinned widely, “Wait. That’s gotta mean that the Mad Clowns are here! Oh, man, Jaune you are going to love these guys.”

“They dress up as clowns and go to metal concerts?” He asked, a little worried about what Heavy Metal Clowns would be like in appearance and personality.

“Yeah! Normal clowns, like with the big floppy shoes and everything. And they give out free ice cream to the people that want it!”

“That… doesn’t sound too bad,” Jaune admitted.

“They also will kick your ass if they catch you trying to start shit. Just a heads up.”

Jaune blanched, and any expression of joy on his face slipped free like water running down a window on a rainy day. Nora started cracking up and Pyrrha let out a slight chuckle of her own. “Relax, Jaune,” Pyrrha tried to reassure him (it wasn’t working very well), “Pretty much everyone will try to kick your ass if you start shit, the three of us included. But you should be warned that we mean starting fights or picking on people without reason when we say ‘start shit’.”

Jaune decided that being quiet and staying out of everyone’s way was probably the best option for the whole evening.

He was also fully aware that none of the other people in the car would let him take that course of action.

After a fashion, Ren found a parking spot and his car shuddered to a stop. Ren constantly claimed that it was a faulty transmission, but any individual with even a minor semblance of mechanical experience could tell you that the car was just sick and tired of being so completely and totally unextraordinary that it cried itself to sleep.

Ren often dismissed the water underneath his car as condensation that had slipped down the pipes, but they were really his car’s tears. He would never find this out.

Jaune stepped out of the car and even the air tasted metallic. There was a flavor of iron on the wind, and was slightly accompanied by the scent of tobacco smoke and cooking meat. He looked over at Nora over the top of the car and could see that she was salivating.

“Oh my god, they have barbecue! I love barbecue. Ren. Ren! We need to get some brisket.”

“We can get that once we get inside. Let’s move,” Ren said, his voice still horrendously distorted to the point where Jaune had to parse together what he said, “The concert starts in an hour.”

“Wait,” Jaune asked as he started to follow Pyrrha to the ticket scan booth (it was the only open point in the chain-link wall surrounding the whole space), “What’s the rest of the time for?”

“Catching up with old friends,” Ren said as they stepped out into one of the parking aisles. Finally, Jaune could take in the full majesty of his outfit.

If Pyrrha’s getup was a cyberpunk artist’s reference for the hero of their story, then Ren’s was definitely reference for either the really badass assassin/mercenary type that winds up doing a heel-face turn and joins the good guys to use his murder skills for righteousness… or the horrendously corrupt hacker that is trying to bring all of society down around its ears.

Three adjectives came to mind when Jaune looked at Ren’s outfit.

Devoted.

Precise.

Flawless.

With but a glance, Jaune could tell that Ren had made every single stitch and rivet of that clothing himself, from the high, studded collar that almost came up to his ears to the dull steel tipping his boots. Only someone that had skill as a tailor and schooling as a theatrical costume designer could showcase so much detail in a single outfit, making it look over-the-top in the best kind of way in the process.

The first thing that caught Jaune’s attention was the hair. Ren’s hair was styled in a menagerie of spikes almost a full foot long. Only now was Jaune able to place a strange smell that was wafting around in Ren’s car: glue. Ren had used glue to style his hair into such intense and perfect spikes, making his skull look like a sea urchin in the process, complete with a single pink spike up in the front. Ren, being the stickler for detail that he was, had probably partitioned off his highlight before he even started planning the rest of the spike setup.

The hair, however, was the tip of the iceberg. Even going past the asymmetrical makeup that looks like it was designed to completely and totally fuck with a every piece of facial recognition software out there on the market, Jaune’s eyes were drawn to the gas mask. This wasn’t something that would be standard issue for any particular war where aerosolized chemical weapons were involved. This was something that was commandeered for the purpose of aesthetic, and then tricked out to look even cooler.

The matte-black plastic gas mask, practically glued to Ren’s face, had a pair of light pads in place of the filters, electrical bolts flickering about on their face, and they only seemed to intensify when he spoke through a Darth-Vader-style grille that distorted his voice to the point of almost unintelligibility.

Moving further and further down, Jaune saw that Ren wore a coat that was nearly floor-length, buttoned up to his neck with a collar popped up almost to his ears and studded with dull steel. Every bit of steel on Ren’s person was dull, it seemed. Almost as if he wanted to draw attention to specific areas, but through use of quantity rather than shininess.

The coat itself was not so much sewn together as it was stapled. And by “stapled”, Jaune began to realize that it was more riveted together. Every single seam of that coat had a steady line of carefully-spaced studs that served to cinch the pieces of cloth to one another. Of course, if they were all lined up flush to one another, that would be boring, so Ren had made a point to use obliques in order to create this perfect and carefully crafted image of disorder.

The truth was that it was all rather orderly, but Ren had designed it so it didn’t look that way. More than anyone else here, Jaune could see through Ren’s schemes… at least with his outfit. Everything else from everyone was a complete and total mystery to him.

Jaune assumed that Ren had some sort of T-shirt or long-sleeved shirt on underneath (black, more likely than not), and that it was tucked into a rather impressive pair of pants. The pants themselves were normal black jeans at first glance.

Then Jaune took into consideration the fact that there was a hand-woven leather mesh over the outside of the pants, cinched to the trousers themselves so it looked like they were part of the original design.

He had the intense feeling that Ren would not, in fact, be moshing tonight due to the carefully crafted nature of the outfit, especially considering the leather pants.

Jaune knew for a fact that it was incredibly hard to move in leather pants. He was unwilling to give the details, even when asked.

Despite Ren’s apprehensions, the line to get into the concert area was only about thirty people deep. Thirty people went by rather quickly, since it only accounted for scanning the ticket bar codes and the occasional pat down. Metal detectors would be pretty much useless for this whole lot, since June was an outlier among outliers in the sheer deficit of metal he had on his person.

This was to be expected, as far as the security guards were concerned. The name of the genre is what they would be scanning for in the first place.

Jaune went through a quick pat down (he was one of the random selectees, it appeared, simply by virtue of him not wearing as much gear as everyone else), and passed through the metaphorical gates to the concert.

What greeted him was a cornucopia of insanity, mostly colored black with glimmers of metal. Men with long hair and a deficit of sleeves chatted casually with women with enough piercings to set off a metal detector. Guys looking like zombies clashed with girls looking like Vikings. Jaune found himself staring in disbelief for a moment before Pyrrha’s hand rested on his shoulder.

The touch of a friend jolted him back to reality, and he shook off the cobwebs spun by a spider of confusion. “Are you alright, Jaune?” she asked, concern clear in her voice.

“Yeah… just a little surprised,” Jaune said with a hint of apprehension and admiration.

“About?”

“Everyone seems so friendly,” he explained, gesturing at all of the metalheads. From goth to industrial, from black to heavy, from grind to thrash, all kinds of metal fans intermingled and interacted. It seemed to be a case of “If you’re tough enough to get past the door, fuck, we’ll welcome you.”

Nora pushed between the two of them and stormed forward with a purpose, her face set in a grim expression of determination and grit. Jaune looked up and saw her targets, and immediately became worried.

Across the way, there were three men that walked as anachronisms among the crowd. Each of them sported a thick beard, pieces of chainmail sewn into their clothing. One of them even had an eyepatch, horned helmet, and a great spear in hand with a little orange zip-tie near its head. This one, a massive, blonde-bearded man with a scowl on his face and fury in his visible eye, appeared to be their leader.

He passed his spear to the black-bearded Viking man on his right. He took off his horned helmet and handed it to the red-bearded Viking man on his left. Unnecessary accoutrements cast aside, he stormed forward. Jaune could easily tell that the Odin wannabe was easily a foot and change taller than Nora, but her step did not falter in the slightest. She instead quickened her pace and leapt at him.

Instead of striking her down, however, the Viking caught her in an embrace with a laugh, speaking in words that were too distant to make out. However, there was a sense of friendliness… nay, love, that passed between the two of them, and Jaune felt at ease once more. Pyrrha was laughing audibly alongside him, and rested her hand on Jaune’s shoulder anew.

“Come on,” she encouraged him. “Let’s go meet Jurgen.”

“Jurgen?” Jaune asked with mild incredulity. Jurgen was a name that seemed to stay on the other side of the great pond, a name that deserved a “boom chicka wow-wow” soundtrack and a whole lot of schnitzel.

“I don’t know if it’s his real name or not, but Leif and Farkas are definitely not the other guys’ real names,” Pyrrha responded, addressing his concerns. When she named the other two Vikings, she pointed first at the ginger, then at the man with hair dark as coal.

“So,” Jurgen said as Jaune approached, “This is the one you have told me about.” Even his manner of speaking was regal enough to be worthy of godliness, and it carried a slight musical accent to it that made Jaune’s head tilt.

“Yep! Jaune Arc, this is Jurgen Olafson. With him are Leif Ericson and Farkas Magnuson.”

“Lots of sons,” Jaune said as he extended his hand to the Vikings one at a time. Each of them grabbed his forearm rather than his hand (a traditional handshake in the times before the Victorian Era), and pulled him in for a quick embrace.

“Look for any of our raiding party if you get lost, Jaune,” Farkas said, “We will help you sail home.”

Jaune found their verbiage a little strange for a moment, but it all clicked after a fashion. To these guys, this was just another version of full-contact LARPing.

He found himself smiling and nodded to the man, stepping into their realm when he responded. “I thank you for your hospitality, Farkas Magnuson. May our final meeting be in the halls of Valhalla at the table of Odin Allfather.”

The three men paused for a second, then burst out laughing in sheer joy before Jurgen clapped Nora on the shoulder. “Little Sister, you never told us that he would react so casually!”

“He rolls with the punches really well,” Nora said, and slugged Jaune in the shoulder to accentuate her point. It hurt, but he didn’t rub where she struck, lest it detract from her argument. “Trust me, he’s going to have a blast tonight.”

“Excellent,” Jurgen said and took his helm and spear back from his friends, “Then we shall meet you in the pit.”

“Keep an eye out,” Nora said as she gave each of them a firm final handshake, “I’ll be the one kicking your asses.”

The three Vikings let out roaring guffaws and meandered onwards, leaving the group of four to their business. Jaune stared at Nora for a second, waiting for an explanation before she said, “They’re really heavily into Nordic Folk Metal, more commonly known as Viking Metal. I think you might dig Týr and Korpiklaani, though Amon Amarth might be a little bit gravelly for you.”

“You’re not making any sense, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know,” Nora said to Jaune, then started to peer out across the edges of the fencing in order to try and find where that delicious barbecue smell came from earlier. Eventually, Nora perked up and started tugging on Ren’s sleeve (he didn’t seem to mind too much), and started to demand that they make their way to get food.

“But you ate before we left the house, Nora.”

“Ren, I could always eat. You know this.”

“You had like five tacos.”

“I could have had like four more.”

“Nora.”

“Ren.”

“We’re not getting you more food,” he said, even as he got dragged away to get Nora more food. Jaune watched them with a mild sense of amusement and a sigh of concession.

“I’m pretty sure she has a portal to another dimension in her stomach,” he commented to Pyrrha, who seemed to be fixated on the two of them walking away, hand in hand. Jaune may have been reading too much into the whole situation, but he thought he saw a dust of red on her cheeks and an expression somewhere between admiration and jealousy.

“I think I could go for a beer,” Pyrrha blurted, standing up straight and staring Jaune in the face, “Could you go for a beer? I could go for a beer let’s go for a beer.”

She moved right past him, so close that he could smell the scent of the conditioner she had used on her hair, and he found his feet moving to follow her, if only to see what had her so shook up. The fact that her beauty and magnetism and the previously mentioned post-apocalyptic war goddess outfit definitely did not have any bearing on the fact that he followed her, nor how close he stayed to her. If he so desired, he could have taken her fingers in his own and probably caused the mighty computer that was Pyrrha’s brain to perform a nosedive into a fatal error and a blue screen of death.

Of course, doing so would probably require that Jaune possessed a certain quantity of “not in my right mind”. As of right now, since Jaune was wearing steel-toed boots and surrounded by a bunch of people that probably lived and breathed this music that he had only passing experience with, so the quantity that he possessed was about a quarter tank, if one were to use a gasoline metaphor.

In order to undertake such a bold and thoroughly insane task, however, Jaune would probably need at least three quarters of a tank, and that was a whole lot of “not in my right mind” that Jaune would be increasingly hard-pressed to find over the course of the evening.

Granted, if he had any inkling of what Ren and Nora had planned for him, he would quickly find that there was a lot more to be had, and that he would find himself with quite the surplus of “not in my right mind” by the time he left the concert this evening.

After a fashion of walking in comfortably close proximity (almost touching, to be honest), Pyrrha and Jaune found themselves in line at the “beverage booth”. As with beverage booths at events all across the United States, from concerts to renaissance fairs, the drinks were bound to be overpriced, but they were served by beautiful women that showed quite a bit of cleavage due to the knowledge that tits would bring in tips.

Jaune reached for his wallet, only for Pyrrha to stop him by clamping her hand down around his wrist in a grip like iron. While she may have seemed tough as nails in appearance now, he had to keep in mind two things. First, Pyrrha generally wore shorts and tank tops when she was in a casual situation. Second: between Jiujitsu, Muay Thai, Krav Maga, boxing, and Karate, she could kick pretty much anyone’s ass in no less than four different languages. While the constant training was not very apparent unless you looked closely, the feeling of her hand on his wrist was an undeniable effect of her continued training.

“I’ve got this,” Pyrrha said firmly, then realized that she was not only touching Jaune but also probably hurting him and let go.

“Come on. You dragged me here and gave me a ticket,” Jaune tried to protest. He would let her buy the beers if she continued to insist, but it couldn’t hurt to protest for the sake of politeness, “I can cover this round.”

“Jaune, Ren has enough flasks hidden in that coat of his to make Nora unable to walk. He’ll provide for the rest of the night. Until then, I’ve got us covered,” Pyrrha explained as they got to the front of the line. Their server was a pretty girl with a black bob and snakebite piercings at the corners of her mouth, barbed rings glimmering in the dim light.

“What’ll it be?” she asked, leaning forward and staring at Jaune, under the false impression that he was going to order. The action gave Jaune a direct line of sight down the front of her low-cut shirt, and he had to do everything in his willpower to keep his eyes pulled away from the incredibly tantalizing sight. If he stared, he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself for succumbing so quickly and easily to temptation, and if Pyrrha caught him staring, she would be pissed off for the remainder of the evening, which would have a set of problems all on its own.

“Two Guiness, please,” Pyrrha said as she passed a twenty to the girl that was already pouring their drinks. The bill disappeared beneath the counter, there came the ring of a cash register, and Pyrrha received four dollars in change, two of which went directly into the tip jar.

“Thank you,” the server said as she handed up the first cup of beer, then followed it with a second not long afterwards. She passed the beer over to Pyrrha carefully, lest any of it spill, and called out “Next!” The beer was out of her hands, the customers were supposed to move along. What happened to their drinks or them was no longer her concern.

Jaune and Pyrrha stepped out of the way, and she passed him one of the plastic cups full of beverage before she sipped on her own. She didn’t really calm visibly, but her hand steadied a little bit. “So do you have any questions so far, Jaune?”

“Not… really?” Jaune said, still a little confused by the whole situation. It seemed like a concert of any other genre, but there were people dressed in all kinds of crazy clothes, getting ready to beat the living snot out of one another in a mosh pit. “I mean, I mainly have questions about what to expect over the course of the night, but I also don’t really want you to spoil anything for me.”

Pyrrha gave him a warm smile and walked so close to him that their shoulders were almost touching. They were making their way back to the barbecue stand, slowly but surely, while conversing and interacting people swirled around them in a swarm, taking care not to bump into anyone they didn’t know already. Naturally, this meant that Jaune saw a lot of people bumping into practically everyone, while almost nobody bumped into Pyrrha and himself.

“I’m just hoping you enjoy yourself tonight, Jaune,” Pyrrha said, sort of leaning on him as they walked. Jaune felt his heart skip a beat just from the contact of her shoulder with his, and he took a deep breath to steady his nerves.

“I’m hoping I can as well,” he admitted, “to be honest, all of this is still a little intimidating. I don’t think I’ve seen people look so casually terrifying before.”

“They’re a bunch of sweethearts once you get to know them,” Pyrrha commented, the happy note back in her voice, no longer full of longing.

“I don’t doubt it. But I think they’d be nicer to you than they would to me.”

“Doubtful. Watch,” She raised a hand and stopped a man walking by with an “Excuse me!”

The man was clean-shaven with long brown hair and a getup similar to Jaune’s. The only difference was that he had sleeve-length tattoos depicting grim reapers and motorcycle parts. “Yeah, miss?” he asked, clearly not bothered by being stopped in the first place.

“Sorry to bother,” Pyrrha said, “It’s my friend’s first time at a metal concert. Could you give him some tips?”

Immediately the man’s face lit up, “Oh, hell yeah, man! Name’s Nick. And you two are…”

“I’m Pyrrha,” she said, “And this is Jaune.”

“Nice to meet you, guys!” he said, a broad smile on his face. “It’s always great seeing new people get involved in the scene. What do you need to know, man?”

Jaune looked over at Pyrrha, who gave a self-satisfied shrug. He looked back at Nick and said, “I’m worried about getting knocked over when I go into a mosh pit. Don’t people get trampled in those kinds of things?”

“Trampled?” Nick said, almost offended by the notion, “Dude, no self-respecting metalhead would let that kind of shit happen. The main rule about the mosh is that you come out with a couple of scrapes, maybe some bruises, the occasional cut, but no serious injuries. Someone goes down, and you see them go down, you call out for a halt, help the downed dude up, make sure they’re cool, and get the mosh going again.”

Jaune nodded as the guy listed off the procedure step by step, not really surprised at all. It all seemed like common sense, if he was going to be honest. “I was always under the impression that mosh pits were no-holds-barred beatdown kind of situations,” Jaune explained once Nick finished, “Like people died every concert because of them.”

“Nah, man,” Nick said, waving it off, “Society tries to put this stigma on us, claim that we’re a bunch of violent monsters, but you know that’s just the man saying shit behind our backs.”

“Well, thanks for the information, Nick. Catch you later,” Jaune said, extending his hand in farewell and thanks. Nick gave Jaune a firm (but not bone-crushing) handshake and went on his merry way, leaving Jaune and Pyrrha alone once again.

There was a moment of silence between the two of them before they spoke at the same time.

“Okay, you were right.”  
“I told you so.”

There was a beat, then the two of them burst out laughing before continuing along towards the barbecue tent.

“So you were right,” Jaune said, and Pyrrha accepted her victory with a smile and a bump of her elbow into his.

“I told you so,” she said as they went along, “Metalheads are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, even if they look scary as hell.”

“I thought the Vikings earlier were only nice because I was with Nora,” Jaune explained. Sure enough, the other two members of their party came into view as he spoke. Nora waved at the two of them with a plastic fork and tried to talk around a mouthful of brisket, but the buzz of the other, closer conversations drowned out the distant sound.

“She does have that effect on people, doesn’t she?” Pyrrha said with a little chuckle as they made their way towards the picnic table where Ren and Nora were set up with another couple that had all the stylings of punk, but wore the traditional black of metal.

“Jaune, you gotta try this brisket, it’s so good!” Nora said just after swallowing.

Jaune politely refused and figured it would be polite to introduce himself to the other couple that were talking to Ren in a rather animated way. “Hey, I’m Jaune.”

“I’m Alex and that’s Lara,” the first of the two girls said. She wore a bandanna around her head, keeping curly blonde hair in check. Her partner had her hair styled up into black spikes to compliment the shoulder pads she wore that wouldn’t be out of place in a torturer’s dungeon. Alex, on the other hand, had piercings shaped like dragons in each ear that curled around the outside and hooked through at the top as well as the bottom, and sported eyeshadow and lipstick that were styled to make her look almost corpselike.

“Ren was telling me that this is actually your first metal concert,” Alex explained. Lara didn’t interact with the two of them at all, instead talking with Ren about his outfit. From what Jaune could pick up, Lara worked in costume design as well, though it was more as a digital animator than a theatre person. It certainly explained why the two of them were having such an animated conversation.

“Yeah, and I’m digging the vibe so far,” Jaune said, nodding in satisfaction, “Everyone’s been really nice, which means that I’m a little worried for them to start beating the snot out of one another in the mosh pit.”

Alex gave a snort and directed her next statement at Pyrrha, “You’ve got a good one here. He’s funny. Not a lot of guys are funny like that these days.”

Pyrrha stood up straight as a rod and blurted out, “He’s not my boyfriend.”

Jaune felt his heart sink a little. He didn’t know if she was too quick on the draw with the response because she wasn’t interested (which kind of flew in the face of what everyone was telling him), or because she was and she was at least trying to save face for Jaune.

Nora leaned over and whispered something in Alex’s ear behind her hand, and that prompted Alex to start giggling uncontrollably. Jaune and Pyrrha both tilted their head at the behavior (neither of them noticed that the other performed this particular action, but Nora and Alex saw it and found themselves laughing even harder), and it took Alex a moment to get control of herself again.

“Sorry. I was just thinking about something else. I should introduce you to one of my girlfriends, then,” Alex teased, a slow smile on her lips, “She’s really cute. Has a good sense of humor. And she’ll like the fact that you’re willing to try new things.”

Jaune felt his face heating up, something that only intensified when Pyrrha decided to intervene once again, “He’s spoken for.”

Alex glanced over at Pyrrha with an expression of bemusement, like a cat that was watching the canary opening up its cage. “Oh? I thought you said he wasn’t your boyfriend. Rather loudly, I might add.”

“He’s not. He’s… my friend’s boyfriend. She couldn’t be here because she’s sick so we brought him along instead.” A flimsy lie if Pyrrha had ever told one, and Alex seemed to know.

“Oh, taking her boyfriend away while she’s sick instead of leaving him to care for her? You homewrecker, you.”

“She told me to. She didn’t want him getting sick, too.” Now she was building up a little bit of a serious story, something that would have some clout behind it.

“Huh. That was nice of her,” Alex said with a nod. It was easy to tell that she knew Pyrrha was full of shit for a very obvious reason, but she let it be, “Well, have extra fun for your girlfriend tonight, Jaune. It’s a shame. I think that you and Teresa would have gotten along really well. Anyway, we gotta get going, Lara. The show’s going to start soon.”

Lara and Ren exchanged their final goodbyes, and the other couple left the table. Once they were out of earshot, Nora stuffed the last bit of brisket in her mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of Jaune’s beer.

“Hey!”

“Oh, hush. Ren has enough rum on him to blind a pirate.”

“That’s not the point. I was enjoying that.”

“And I did too.”

Jaune shut up and folded his arms, staring over at Pyrrha. She was clearly still miffed about the whole thing so it certainly warranted a question.

“Why did you tell her that I had a girlfriend?” Jaune asked, and Nora snickered.

“I know why,” she said, and Pyrrha twitched, followed by a quiet scraping of metal on metal. Presumably, Pyrrha had stomped on Nora’s foot in order to punish her for mouthing off, but the steel toe and sabaton had probably sabotaged that attempt.

“I didn’t like the idea of her… introducing you to people just because she thought you were funny.”

That made Jaune’s head tilt again, even more confused than before.

“I’m going to use the restroom. Nora, could you come with me?” she asked in a rather clipped tone of voice that wouldn’t take no for an answer. She stood up and started to make her way over to a set of porta-potties that stood off to one side of the concert ground. Nora licked her fingers clean of barbecue sauce and followed, trotting quickly and quietly to catch up with her friend.

“What’s up with her? Did I say something that pissed her off?” Jaune asked Ren when they were alone.

“No. Alex did. Probably at Nora’s request,” Ren confessed, and reached around the back of his head to unbuckle and remove the gas mask and voice distorter, pulling it away from his head and setting it (rather gingerly) down on the table.

“Why?”

“Because she loves you, you idiot.”

That made Jaune pause and blink a few times, just staring at Ren for a moment in a state of utter confusion. “She what.”

“You heard me. She loves you. She doesn’t stop talking about you when she and Nora are alone and they think that I’m not listening while I work. Hell, she doesn’t stop talking about you even when she knows I’m listening.”

“I…”

Ren sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Do you like her.”

“What?”

“Do you like her.”

“Yeah, she’s really cool and I think she’s one of the most impressive people that I know.”

“Not what I meant, and you know it.”

Jaune paused and bit his lower lip, finishing off his beer in order to give himself time to think, “Yeah. I guess I do. I just always thought that she was out of my league, you know?”

“Why do you say that?” Ren asked as he undid one of his buttons and reached inside his longcoat, rummaging around for something.

“She’s gorgeous, really intelligent, and she’s a nationally-acclaimed martial artist that could probably stand toe to toe in the octagon with Ronda Rousey and stand a decent chance of winning. She owns her own studio. I don’t even own my apartment,” he said, leaning back and letting out a groan. “Why would someone like her be into someone like me?”

“Because she doesn’t care about superficial things like fame or money. If she wanted that, she could go to Hollywood and get her pick of the litter,” Ren said with a chuckle as he removed his hand from inside his coat and offered a flask to Jaune.

“You’re in love. Have a drink,” he said, and unscrewed it with clumsy Nazgûl-armored fingers.

“I… don’t want to get too crazy. I still need to be able to stand.”

“You’re going to be glad for the numbing effects when you’re in the mosh pit.”

Jaune took the drink. He took another, then passed it back to Ren after swallowing. Ren took a belt of his own, then screwed the cap back on tight, tucked into his breast pocket, and buttoned himself back up. “Try and tell her how you feel,” Ren said, buckling his mask back on and turning all the light and sound back on. “I guarantee that it’ll make her night.”

“Did you just quote me at me?” Jaune asked with a little chuckle as they started to make their way over to the porta-potties in order to meet up with the girls. About eight months ago, Jaune had used that exact same line on their friend’s character, Neptune, when he confessed to Jaune that he couldn’t dance and that was what prevented Neptune from going to a very formal event with the person that had asked him.

“Yes. Yes I did.”

It didn’t take long for Nora and Pyrrha to meet up with them. Pyrrha was using the bathroom as an excuse to hit the escape button out of the conversation, and Nora just needed to wash her hands. Even so, when they finally met up again, the tension between Pyrrha and Jaune was thick enough that it would probably take a chainsaw to cut through it.

Jaune was the first one to break the silence as they made their way through the crowd, heading up towards the stage. “I’m glad you stuck up for me like that,” he told Pyrrha, and her gaze immediately cast downward. He continued and said, “I don’t think I could have been comfortable with someone matching me up with their friend that I’d never even met before.”

Pyrrha remained silent for a moment, though she felt her hand scrabbling out for Jaune’s own, taking it gingerly and holding it.

Jaune suddenly became aware of how sweaty his palms were.

Before he could say anything else, Nora held up a hand and said, “Wait.”

Everyone stopped behind her and watched with a sense of befuddlement as Nora squinted slightly and tilted her head, reading the lay of the land. She tapped her foot here and there, getting a feel for the ground underfoot, and turned back to her friends. “We’re standing in the center of where the mosh pit will be. We need to back up.”

Jaune started taking cautious steps back, a couple of people crowding in to the newly vacated space closer to the stage, “How… can you tell?”

“It’s best if you just trust her on this one, Jaune,” Ren explained, patting his friend on the shoulder, “She has an exceptional track record for picking out future battlefields at metal concerts.”

Once again, it was a case of rolling with the punches, and Jaune found himself letting out a quiet “oooookayyyy…” as cheers erupted all around them.

The show was starting.


	3. Chapter 3

The opening act was of a very different vibe from what Jaune had listened to in the car. A group of five men that went by the collective name “Visigoth” started to play a couple of songs that got a lot of heads bobbing, several cheers, and a number of people already throwing up the devil horns that were associated with this particular variety of music.

Bit by bit, Jaune felt the tension growing around them. A few people were even wandering through the crowd, tapping people on the shoulder and slowly but surely clearing out a space. Jaune, Pyrrha, Nora, and Ren were standing on the edge of a ring of open space about fifteen feet in diameter when Visigoth started to play a cover of Slayer’s “Raining Blood”.

As the song started to really get rolling, one of the men that had been clearing the space called out in a voice loud enough to carry, “MOSH!”

Sure enough, several people immediately leapt into the center and started smashing into each other like human bumper cars. A couple of folks swung their arms about but it didn’t really do any good until more and more people stepped inside. There were more than a few punches thrown about, but it was mostly people crashing into each other with reckless abandon.

Nora watched with a broad grin on her face, clearly excited to get in on the action. Ren and Pyrrha cheered the crowd on.

Jaune just stood there and watched the human meat grinder continue with an increasing sense of fear and awe. Everyone in there appeared to be having fun of all things. It was violence for the sake of catharsis, as he saw it, not for the sake of actually kicking someone’s ass.

As Jaune watched on, Nora reached up and tugged him down so she could whisper in his ear.

“Witness me.”

She charged in, a mighty battle cry escaping her lips as she immediately waded into the center of the circle and began crashing about with everyone else. Nobody really seemed to care that she was wearing parts of a suit of platemail, nor that she was about five-foot-two and a little bit petite.

She was just like the rest of them in that moment. Violent, thoroughly insane, and mighty.

“Ready?” Pyrrha asked, resting her hand on Jaune’s shoulder. He glanced over at her and gulped, not sure if he could give an honest answer to that.

Pyrrha dove in, immediately swallowed up by the churning mass of black-clad figures and flailing arms. Jaune caught another glimpse of Nora as the mosh churned, still standing, sweating, and completely out of her mind with joy.

“Fuck it,” Jaune said, and went unto the breach.

He put his arms up, elbows in, kept his head low, just like Nora taught him, and charged into the pit, immediately getting battered around. A couple of times, he felt feet crash down on his toes. Thank goodness he wore the boots that Nora recommended him.

One or two fists hammered into his arms, another into his back. He jostled himself around, bumping and crashing into people enough to send them in another direction but not to throw them off balance. He let out a roar of berserker rage, caught up in the moment and eventually fell into the rhythm of violence that everyone else had subscribed to.

He thrashed about, crashing into everyone else just as violently as they were crashing into him, and even throw a fist here and there as he moved about. Generally speaking, though, he was just another black-clad cog in a machine designed to help people release their inner beast. As time went on, “Raining Blood” came to a stop, but that didn’t slow the mosh pit down.

They didn’t need music to do their thing. This was something that would keep on going as long as there were people willing to step into it.

Jaune was having a blast. He wondered to himself why he hadn’t done this sort of thing before. He crashed, smashed, and reeled with everyone else in the pit, letting out battle cries and laughter. He felt a piece of metal dig into his upper arm, and turned to see Nora crashing away from him with a giggle. He got the feeling she would have waved if the natural momentum of the pit didn’t threaten to take her arm off.

By the time the next song was halfway done, Jaune felt like he’d been in the pit long enough, choosing to cycle out and pushing his way towards the edge.

As he got close, however, someone had to be a complete and total cockbite.

He approached the outer edge of the pit, only to have a man wearing biker leathers with a long black ponytail grab him by the shoulders, a massive grin on his face.

He drove his forehead into Jaune’s in the mightiest headbutt that he could have mustered, prompting Jaune to stumble back.

Luckily for him, his back was to the outside of the pit, and he found himself dizzy, world spinning, and caught by a couple of men that were clearly concerned about his well-being.

“Dude, you okay?”

“Yeah,” Jaune said, reaching up to wipe the sweat from his forehead, “Just… wow. That guy was a dick.”

“Yeah, man, total dick move,” one agreed.

“We’ll give him a thumping for you if you’d like,” the other said.

“No,” Jaune said, still kind of out of it, “I’m fine. You don’t need to kick his ass.”

“Alright, man,” the first said, “So long as you’re sure.”

“Let’s go find you a seat. What’s your name?” The second asked.

“Jaune,” he said, and let the two very kind metalheads help him towards a bench. The opening act had finished their set, and Jaune’s head was clearing up, but the first guy (who Jaune found out was named Jeremy) went to get Jaune some water.

The second guy, Carlos, stuck with Jaune as they sat down and waited. “Hey, Jaune?” Carlos said, “You… uh… know you’re bleeding, right?”

Jaune paused and looked down at the palm of his hand, where he had wiped the sweat from his brow, and frowned at the red that covered his hand. “God fucking dammit.”

“You should kick his ass next time you see him. The guy that headbutted you, I mean,” Carlos offered. Jaune held his hand up and shook his head.

“No. I’ll definitely chew him out, though,” Jaune said, and that made Carlos laugh.

“Nothing really seems to faze you, huh?”

“When you have your Friday night interrupted by a petite girl in plate mail saying that she’s going to throw you in a mosh pit at your first metal concert, you really just have to roll with the punches,” Jaune explained as Jeremy came back.

“Fuck, man, you’re bleeding.”

“I know. Thanks,” Jaune responded as he took the water and snagged a sip. Jeremy had a bandanna tied around his neck, and took it off to offer to Jaune to help him clean up.

“No, I’m fine,” Jaune said, still a little dizzy from the whole ordeal, and held up a hand to Jeremy.

Jeremy responded by taking the bottle of water that he’d brought for Jaune, pouring some of it onto the bandanna before pressing it to Jaune’s forehead. “Clean up a little, man. You look badass, but you also look like a mess.”

Jaune conceded the point and pulled out his phone to text Nora, explaining what happened. Even though the main event had happened, with Sabaton beginning their set with “Swedish Pagans”, Nora was there in less than five minutes. She came running over, plate mail clanking, with Ren and Pyrrha in tow. “Oh my god, Jaune! What happened?”

“Someone hit me in the head,” he explained, but that was about all he could say. Pyrrha thanked the two guys and sat down next to Jaune, pulling the bandanna away from his forehead.

“It’s not too bad. Won’t even need stitches,” she said, patting his cheek.

“That’s a relief,” Jaune responded with a calm smile, which quickly faded away as he saw someone approaching.

The guy that had headbutted him was making a beeline for the group.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Jaune said with a groan and looked up at the guy as he came over. “That’s the guy that headbutted me.”

Carlos cracked his knuckles at about the same time that Nora cracked her neck, and the guy in question swaggered up to the group with a cocky, half-drunk smile.

“Holy shit,” the guy said with a laugh, pointing at Jaune’s right eyebrow, nearly split down the middle and still oozing slightly, “You’re fucking bleeding, man.”

Jaune scowled up at the man, particularly the hooked ring that protruded from the man’s left eyebrow, still glistening with blood and maybe a little bit of hair.

“Yeah,” Jaune said sourly, “I guess it makes sense because part of my face is still fucking attached to your eyebrow ring.”

The other man paused, reaching up for the article of jewelry in question and wiping it clean with his fingers. He stared down at the tuft of eyebrow hair that he held and extended his hand to Jaune, “Fuck, man. Want it back?” He then laughed like he had just told the funniest joke in the world and tossed the useless bits aside.

“What do you want,” Jaune said flatly. This asshole was quickly overstaying his welcome, and Jaune was half tempted to return the favor of a headbutt, except it would be a knee to the gut.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to this cutie,” he said, meandering on up to Pyrrha. She frowned and stood up to face him. He was about Jaune’s height, meaning that he was a couple of inches taller than Pyrrha was, but she seemed to stand nose to nose with him simply by virtue of the force of her personality.

Jaune found himself wanting to stand up and give this guy a what-for, but he was still a little bit staggered by the whole headbutt and bleeding thing. He could stand and walk on his own, but a fight just might be out of the question.

Plus there was the whole thing about Pyrrha standing there.

This poor bastard was going to wind up on the ground in some way or another.

Even so, Jeremy and Carlos stood up in order to have Pyrrha’s back if she needed a bit of extra assistance.

“So, babe, what do you say? Want to hang out? Smoke some shit? I got bud, crank, blow, whatever you need,” he said, though he moved a little bit closer and gave her a crooked smile, eyeing her up and down with a satisfied expression, “Maybe you could give me some blow too.”

Pyrrha stared at him for a second, her face the picture of quiet fury, then burst out laughing, doubled over with the possibility of falling flat on her ass. The dealer that had just tried hitting on her watched and his face twisted in confusion.

“The fuck is so funny?” he asked, clearly a little pissed off at being laughed at in such a way.

“Did you spend all week coming up with that one?” Pyrrha said through a couple more giggles, “Or was it the top of your head? Honestly, I can’t tell which one is more pathetic.”

That crooked smile came back. “You got a sense of humor, huh?” he said, trying to retain a semblance of dignity, “That’s nice. I like a girl with a sense of humor.” He reached out and grabbed her by the wrist, saying, “Come on. Let’s show you a good time.”

Carlos and Jeremy started to step in, but Nora held up a hand and said, “Oh man, watch this.”

What happened in the next few seconds was a series of things that you would only usually see in kung fu movies or in the dreams of a kung fu movie fanatic, because the guy that grabbed Pyrrha made three grave mistakes.

First, he assumed that, just because he was attracted to her, he was able to get what he wanted just by taking it.

Second, he tried to pull this shit when he was surrounded by a number of people that were more than willing and able to kick his ass for the shit he just tried to pull.

Third, he grabbed Pyrrha Fucking Nikos.

Pyrrha didn’t really say anything. It would have been considered eerie under normal circumstances, so in these specific abnormal circumstances it was downright terrifying. She twisted her wrist in his grip, giving her a moment to pull away and reverse the hold, then used her newfound leverage to put his arm behind his back while her foot kicked his knee out from under him and knocked him down to a kneeling position.

Pyrrha held him there for a second before saying, “Don’t you ever touch me again, or I’ll break your arm.” The way she said it was so calm, collected, and tired, like she was a cashier in a checkout line asking if someone wanted to pay cash or credit, and had just gotten a little bit worn out from asking the same question over and over again during the course of her shift.

On either side of Nora, Carlos and Jeremy made the exact same expression, holding a hand up to their mouths and wincing as she brought him low. It wasn’t out of sympathy for the fuckboy. Rather, they were impressed by how flawlessly she had done it.

Nora stood there watching it all like a proud parent, and Jaune finally stood up, having stopped the bleeding.

“Now,” Pyrrha said, “I am going to let you go, and I am going to walk away. I expect you to do the same.”

“Fuck you,” Fuckboy responded, though he did relax, prompting her to release him and start to walk back towards her friends.

The bastard, once again, started to prove that he was going to be a future recipient of a Darwin award and do something so stupid that he would effectively remove himself from the gene pool, allowing future generations to live free of the pollution of his DNA.

He tried to go after her again.

“You fucking… slag!” he called out, staggering to his feet and storming after her, planning on hurting her even if he wound up getting his ass kicked in the process.

Nora started to move forward, Jeremy and Carlos right behind her, and had to pause because they wouldn’t have stayed out of reach otherwise.

Pyrrha timed it perfectly. A quick spin sent her ponytail spinning out behind her, and all the weight that carried with it. Three feet of hair weighed down by several metal rings, the largest of which allowed the barely-restrained mane of red to turn into a flail.

It cracked across Fuckboy’s jaw, an audible smack that made everyone within earshot wince, and she kept on strolling away.

While Fuckboy had stopped coming forward for her, he still managed to keep his footing and take one staggering step forward.

He didn’t take a second because Jaune Spartan-kicked the man in the chest, sending him sprawling, probably unconscious but definitely not getting up soon. Everyone stared at him with confusion that washed away when he said, “That’s for splitting my face open, you dick!”

Of course, security came over and demanded to know what had happened. After a brief explanation and multiple people vouching for the aggrieved parties, Fuckboy was escorted from the premises and everyone could get back to enjoying the concert. Even as security dragged him away, Jaune could swear that he heard Fuckboy muttering curses about Pyrrha being a “piece of shit slag” and how she “won’t be as cocky with [his] dick down [her] throat”.

The general sentiment was that everyone was glad that he’d been escorted away, and that he wouldn’t be hurting anyone else tonight, with any luck.

“You know,” Carlos said to Pyrrha, “I’m kind of pissed at you.”

“Why, because I didn’t let you have a shot at him?”

Carlos nodded in concession, prompting a chuckle from Pyrrha, “Though I doubt I could have done it as elegantly as you did. Holy shit, how long have you been practicing that hair thing?”

“Like a month,” Pyrrha confessed, “It’s so hard to do it when you can’t see the person coming and can’t judge the distance properly.”

“God damn,” Carlos muttered.

Elsewhere, Jeremy did a last look at Jaune’s injuries, shining his phone’s flashlight on the split eyebrow.

“Yeah, you won’t need stitches. It’ll scar nicely and you’ll have a good story to tell,” Jeremy said before putting the light out and patting Jaune’s cheek with a chuckle.

“What? The story of how some drunk asshole split my face open by headbutting me?”

“That was your first mosh pit, right?”

Jaune paused, then nodded, “Yeah.”

“Did you have fun up until that point?”

“I did,” he confessed, “But the whole ‘someone headbutting me so hard I bled’ thing kind of put a damper on the evening.”

Jeremy chuckled and stood up, offering a hand to Jaune and pulling him upright as well. “Mosh pits generally aren’t like that, but sometimes all it takes is that one asshole to ruin things for everyone else.”

“How often does it take to get rid of assholes like that?”

“Not very. Usually before the opening act starts. Oh, shit!” Jeremy said, distracted by the sound of Sabaton starting up their next tune. “I didn’t know they were going to do their Metallica covers tonight. Listen, man, it was great meeting you, but this is one of my favorite songs covered by one of my favorite bands. I gotta go,” he said and started to trot off, “Keep the bandana! Carlos, let’s go!”

Carlos said a quick goodbye to everyone and ran off with his friend, the two of them making their way back into the crowd.

Nora stared up at the stage and said, “I kind of want to get closer.”

Pyrrha glanced over at Jaune and asked, “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” he responded, “I can stand. You two go on ahead. I’ll hang back here with Ren.”

“Thanks, Jaune,” Pyrrha said with a smile. It made her seem really cute, something that was impressive considering the fact that she had probably just fractured a guy’s jaw with her hair.

They left and Ren reached into his breast pocket for the flask again, and Jaune accepted the rum willingly, knowing it would help with the pain a little bit.

“So, aside from what had just happened, did you enjoy the mosh?” Ren asked.

“A lot more than I’d care to admit,” Jaune responded, though he smiled at the exhilarating memory of smashing into everyone else in a state of excitement that seemed to match perfectly with his surroundings. He would have a couple of bruises from it, but nothing too serious. A small price to pay for a good time.

“Regretting coming out with us so far?” Ren continued to press. For the sake of clarity, he’d turned off the voice distorter, so he only sounded like a slightly robotic version of himself due to the speaker in the mask.

“No. Not at all,” Jaune admitted and leaned back on the picnic table’s bench, “I was hesitant at first, but now I’m having a blast. Split-open face notwithstanding.”

“Good,” Ren said with a sense of satisfaction, “It’s always wise to be open to new experiences. Even if they seem painful at first.” He gave a little chuckle at that, and Jaune couldn’t help join in. How strange humans are that they are able to laugh so easily at their own misfortune.

After a fashion, Jaune stood up, handed the flask back to Ren (he had only taken the one nip), and tucked Jeremy’s bandana in his back pocket. “Let’s go and see what Nora and Pyrrha are up to.”

In the midst of the crowd of a couple hundred, Nora and Pyrrha stood about three rows back from the front of the stage. Taller people surrounded Nora, so she couldn’t really see what was going on, but the energy was definitely more than enough to make up for that.

Onstage, Sabaton played their cover of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” to cheers from everyone on the ground. Nora was definitely one of the people most getting into it, playing air guitar and headbanging in time to the music.

Pyrrha, on the other hand, simply bobbed along, knowing that headbanging was bound to cause a repeat performance of her hair smacking someone in the face to potentially dangerous effect.

Over the volume of the song, Pyrrha leaned over to Nora and said, “I’m glad you pointed this out to me. It’s so hard to find a metal concert without going to the underground scenes.”

“So go to the underground scenes,” Nora offered with a nonchalant shrug, “It’s what I do.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to be involved in a scene where there’s just as much meth as metal,” Pyrrha said sourly, and Nora had to concede that point.

“I like it because the mosh pits basically turn into fight clubs.”

“That’s not exactly my style, Nora. You know that.”

“Ms. ‘I’m a black belt in like nine different martial arts-” 

“Five. And most of them don’t use belts.”

“Same difference. You have all of that martial arts skill and don’t want to fight someone?”

“Not unless they give me reason to,” Pyrrha said. This was an argument she and Nora had had multiple times, and it always went the exact same way.

“But what if you reeeeeally want to kick someone’s ass?”

“Then I show restraint,” Pyrrha said as “For Whom the Bell Tolls” ended to cheers. Nora and Pyrrha paused their argument to cheer with them. One of the next songs was a power ballad that spoke of Trench Warfare in none-too-kind terms, and it gave Nora and Pyrrha a slightly quieter avenue to continue talking.

“Maybe you need to not show restraint sometimes,” Nora commented.

“I do that, someone goes to the hospital.”

“It doesn’t have to be fighting, Pyrrha,” Nora chided, “You don’t want to show the world what a badass you are unless it’s in a controlled environment. That’s okay. I mean in other things.”

“Usually Ren’s the cryptic one,” Pyrrha said sourly.

“What can I say? He’s rubbing off on me,” Nora responded with a chuckle, “My point is that you are always so cautious and restrained. Maybe you need to go a little wild with something.”

The song’s chorus hit for the final time, and Nora made a point to sing along with it, throwing up her devil horns and cheering as the song ended. The lead singer started to play the crowd a little bit, asking them how they were feeling. Several hundred people gave cheers of assent.

“Some people are feeling ‘yeah’, it seems,” the singer commented, and a couple of people (the drummer and bassist included) found that slightly amusing, if the laughter was any indication.

“This next song is about a great tragedy that befell Europe, more so than war. War is never pretty, but senseless loss of life makes war look reasonable,” the crowd cheered at that, “This next one is called ‘Final Solution’.”

A roar of satisfaction went up from the crowd as Nora and Pyrrha heard Jaune calling their name. Nora turned around and ushered her friends up to join them. As the guys pushed their way through the crowd and the opening notes of “Final Solution” began, Nora spoke to Pyrrha and said only, “Cut a little loose, Pyrrha. Because Jaune’s too chicken to do it himself.”

Pyrrha’s face lit up with blush at being called out so blatantly on her feelings, and started to stammer out a retort, only to be interrupted by Jaune and Ren joining them once again.

“That was quick,” Pyrrha commented, “We weren’t even away for one full song.”

“Eh, what can we say? We missed you,” Jaune said in a playful tone, “You look a little red in the face, Pyrrha. Singing your lungs out?”

“Yep! I just love that song so much. Grew up with it, you know?” Pyrrha responded with a smile. She could pass it off as that, couldn’t she? But why was she still refusing to act. Dithering would get her nowhere.

“Jaune!” Nora called out over the music, “This is the one I was telling you about in the car!”

Immediately, Jaune’s attention snapped up to the stage, the expression on his face nothing short of awestruck, as he took in the lyrics.

The song used the medium of a power metal ballad to tell the story of Kristallnacht, of the horrors that happened within the fences of Auschwitz, of how the ash of the millions that died in the concentration camps blotted out the sky, and Jaune’s expression of wonder only grew more intense.

Such is the power of music: to enrapture, to tell a story, to present it in a way that is pleasing to the ear and draws a crowd, that entices and entrances people to the point of auditory orgasm. Jaune was fully caught in the throes of the music and Pyrrha fell in love all over again just by staring at his face when he listened to the song.

“Nora,” he said, absentmindedly reaching over to tap her shoulder, “Nora. I need metal CDs. What else do you know that’s like this?”

Nora started ticking off options on her fingers. “Okay, so I’ll give you Týr, Powerwolf, and Hammerfall, but I think you’d like Alestorm too, so I’ll loan you their album as well. They’re pirate metal.”

“Sounds cool,” Jaune said quietly, still in love with the music being blasted at him.

“You’re not really paying attention to what I’m saying, are you?” Nora asked, a little amused by the whole situation.

“Not really, no,” Jaune responded, and then waved his hand so he could continue listening to the song without further interruption.

Nora didn’t know whether to be offended or amused by the lack of attention that Jaune gave her. After a fashion, she leaned towards “amused” because this was what she wanted all along: for Jaune to listen to music that was outside of his usual pop and easy listening and possibly fall in love with it.

If the expression on his face was anything to go by, her scheme worked.

The song continued through its end, then into a rather impressive drum and guitar duet, just the two of the players rocking out, jamming like nobody’s business, to the excitement of the crowd. In the midst of this, the singer began to call out to the people in the front rows, demanding that they make a hole.

Nora immediately realized what was going on and grabbed Jaune’s hand. “Jaune. Wall of Death. He’s doing a Wall of Death.”

“Okay? That’s… nice?” It did not sound nice. It sounded horribly ominous and like something that any sane person would not want to be involved with. Jaune’s could feel that his quotient of “not in my right mind” was about to increase momentarily to somewhere past the halfway mark.

“We’re going,” she said, and started to drag him along. Jaune looked over at Pyrrha with a woeful expression and tried to shake his head “no”, but Nora was far too mighty to be ignored.

They found themselves on stage left, just as the singer began to explain to each side what they were supposed to do.

“Picture that you are on a battlefield. Your foes are before you and you must charge to meet them. You are to rush forward with the intention of claiming victory as your own, to crush your opponents with the might of your charge. I want you to ensure the battle is joined when I say, do you understand?”

People cheered, and Nora was among the loudest.

Jaune was still trying to grasp what was going on. He was standing on the edge of a massive open space just in front of the stage… well, it wasn’t completely open. There were four people standing in the middle, arms spread out as if to accept a wonderful gift, faces turned skywards in anticipation of extreme bliss, and Jaune just couldn’t imagine why.

The duet of guitar and drums came to a climax as the lead singer called out “CHARGE!” and a roar of ferocity escaped from the lips of dozens of people as the two sides began to surge towards one another. Hands pressed at Jaune’s back, urging him forward, so he was forced to move or be trampled underfoot by the bloodthirsty crowd around him. He looked up to see the faces of a small army of metalheads rushing forward to meet him, looked to his side to see Nora running as quickly as she could without tripping over herself, and knew there was no escape from this. He put his arms up, keeping his elbows tucked close to this body, and lowered his head, like a quarterback meeting the enemy line.

The first person he rushed past was one of those four people (total idiots, now that Jaune thought about it) that had been thoroughly insane enough to stand in the middle. After that, he started to crash into the enemy line –good god, he was thinking of them as enemies, just like the singer had told them to- and push his way through.

The shock of running into the wall of other people was enough to almost knock him on his ass, but he still persevered, pushing as hard as he could in order to find a seam in the wall of black-clad flesh that pressed back against him. The people behind him pushed just as hard, giving him more force, but he didn’t want to be stuck between a rock and a hard place for too long. Eventually, he ducked down under a man’s arm and slipped past him. He almost lost his boot in the process because of how the sea of people collapsed behind him, but he still pulled himself through and kept trying to push further through the Wall of Death, searching for an escape.

Surprisingly, it was like breaking a water’s surface tension. Once he got past that first layer of people, the rest seemed to let him through, knowing that he was trying to escape even as they struggled to push the other group of people back. One, two, three more people brushed past him, and Jaune was out. There was an open space of about ten feet in front of him, but he didn’t notice because he kept his head low and his legs moving, even to the point of crashing into someone when he cleared the stage for the Wall of Death.

He crashed into the man. Rather, the man bounced him back with a broad, sturdy chest that Jaune could barely peer over. All of that forward momentum found itself rendered null and void, sending Jaune stumbling backwards, completely off balance.

His arms flailed. He tried to reach out, grab purchase for something, but his hands only grasped empty air in the slow-motion fall backwards onto his ass. Jaune reached back in an attempt to cushion his fall with his right arm extended behind him.

Done correctly, this would work because the arm’s ability to flex would mitigate the impact.

Unfortunately, Jaune did not do this correctly. He made the mistake of locking his elbow.

Instead of using his arm to soften the impact, the locked arm absorbed the full brunt of the blow, and there was a pop when he collapsed. The lead singer saw this and called out, “Man down!”

A few other people took up the cry, “Man down! Man down! Make some room, get him out,” and Jaune found himself being lifted up, dazed once again and very obviously in pain. The massive slab of a man that had knocked Jaune down in the first place was one of the first to help him to his feet, and tried to support him by taking his right arm and using it as a lifting point.

It hurt like a bitch.

“No, no, no, not that…” Jaune whimpered, and the large man immediately let go as Jaune explained, “That’s the arm I fell on. Just… ow…” His shoulder felt like a quart of drain cleaner had been injected into it, and it shot lances of burning pain through his entire chest with each beat of his heart, and there were many beats of his heart going on in a very short period of time.

The man obliged Jaune and moved to the other side, calling out in a voice that was quiet but still seemed to boom, “Make a hole. Injured guy here.”

“Thanks,” Jaune said as they started to clear out a little further and the band began to play one of their other hits, “Panzerkampf”. He looked up at the man that was helping him along and took in his appearance.

The man in question wore a large black vest that hung open over a plain black t-shirt. Everything that he wore was relatively nondescript… rather, it would have been nondescript if it weren’t for the person wearing it.

Jaune knew that the man was tall, and that he had a broad chest, but now that he took the man in a little more fully, he realized just how overwhelmingly massive the man was. Jaune’s eyes came up to the man’s shoulders, putting his height at possibly six and a half feet tall, and he was built in a way that would put a professional linebacker to shame. But everything was proportionally large in such a way that it seemed like his parents went to the “Build a Kid” workshop when he was young and said, “Yeah, can I get this one in the next size up?”

But what drew Jaune’s attention the most was not the man’s size, but his features.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the man had a gentle face. That’s not to say it was soft, because his cheekbones stood out as monoliths on an impassive expression that he wore like Renaissance statues wore marble. It was so much a part of him that it seemed impossible to imagine him without it, though to compare his skin to marble would not only be an exercise in futility, but one in determining impossibility.

His skin had all the smoothness of marble, it was true, but the color of his skin could be compared to Arizona clay or pale mahogany, a sort of brown with just enough of a touch of red to it to give it some character.

The man’s eyes were drooping, almost tired, though the way they moved ensured that he took in every detail of the world around him, and thick black hair extended down along his jawline to form a rather manly, neat beard.

“You’re welcome,” the man responded, and his voice seemed to be a quiet growl, like that of a lion that was simply existing and had no particular desire to be bothered.

“I didn’t get your name,” Jaune said, hoping that he could tack a title to the person that was saving his bacon (he seemed to need a lot of saving tonight, like he was some sort of damsel in distress).

“I didn’t give it,” the man said dispassionately as they came to a bench near the bathrooms, “Sit,” he said, and let go of Jaune so the younger man could collapse into the seat.

Collapse, Jaune did. He landed on the remorseless metal bench with an audible “fwump”, but considered it a quiet mercy despite the bench’s hardness. He tried to move his right arm, but every attempt he made only sent greater surges of pain through his shoulder. “Christ… that hurts.”

“Your shoulder’s dislocated,” the man explained calmly, and he reached out with hands that were like massive bear paws in order to prod and poke around at the shoulder. Each touch made Jaune sharply inhale, and he consider it a blessing that he didn’t groan and whimper in the way that he expected to. The man helping him did not seem impatient, but something like that would try the patience of a saint. “You have your phone?” he asked.

Jaune reached into his pocket and unlocked it, and laid it in the man’s outstretched palm. Even the notoriously large Samsung smartphone seemed bordering on tiny in this man’s hand.

The man immediately took Jaune’s phone and began tapping away, “Is ‘Nora’ here with you?”

“Yes. She was in that mess with me.”

“Hm. Anyone else?”

“Pyrrha and Ren.”

The man gave another grunt and started to tap away on the screen, passing it back to Jaune after a moment. Jaune saw the curt and to-the-point text and knew that Pyrrha would realize in a heartbeat that he hadn’t sent it.

“Dislocated shoulder. At a bench by West Bathrooms. Hazel is helping. Bring ice.”

“Hazel?” Jaune said, and received a grunt of confirmation from the other man, who withdrew a thick Ace bandage from an inner pocket of his vest. Jaune didn’t find it strange that his savior carried one around just randomly. At the moment, there was very little in this world that could surprise Jaune, especially considering that the amount of “not in my right mind” that he carried at the moment was rather high.

Hazel bounced the bandage on his hand, then tucked it in his back pocket before saying, “I’m going to put your shoulder back in joint.”

“That sounds like it’s going to hurt,” Jaune said even as Hazel started to move him into position.

“Yes.”

Now that was interesting. Most people didn’t tend to say the full word of “Yes”, preferring words that had the same number of letters but were generally quicker to say, such as “Yup” and “Yeah”.

Jaune began to realize that, more than anyone else he had met tonight, Hazel was probably the single most interesting and potentially bizarre person that he could have literally crashed into.

Hazel took Jaune’s elbow, instructed him to keep his arm straight, placed his palm on the protruding ball joint of his shoulder, and said, “On three.”

Jaune barely had time to nod before Hazel twisted his arm and shoved the shoulder back into joint.

It’s safe to say that Jaune screamed. He couldn’t tell whether he did or not. His vision went white for a moment as he was blinded by the new and unfamiliar pain. Eventually, his vision cleared up and Jaune was only left with a minor throbbing pain in his shoulder. He looked at Hazel with a weary expression and said, “I thought you said ‘on three’.”

“I did.”

“You didn’t put it in on three.”

“You would have tensed up.”

Jaune started to argue then shook his head. There seemed to be no point in arguing with the stoic man, simply by virtue of him being completely and totally right. Jaune found he was able to move his arm again and gave it a few experimental motions. “Damn… hurts, still, but I can at least move it again.”

“It’s going to be like that for about two weeks. I can cut that time in half if you take your shirt off.”

Once again, Jaune was in no mood and had no room to argue. He stripped out of the black shirt and let Hazel do his thing as his friends came up.

“Jaune, are you okay?” Pyrrha asked, clearly very worried, as she ran up to him and knelt next to the bench. Hazel began wordlessly binding Jaune’s shoulder with enough compression to keep the swelling down, but not enough that it would serve as an accidental tourniquet. Clearly, he’d done this before. “Ren’s off getting some ice from the beverage booth. He’ll be here in a bit.”

“Nora?” Jaune asked.

“She got lost. Went to the East bathrooms instead of the West. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. Just did something kind of stupid.”

“You were in the Wall of Death, weren’t you?” Pyrrha asked with a pointed expression.  
“Nora dragged me into it,” he explained as Ren came up with a Ziploc bag full of ice in hand. Hazel held out his hand, still wordless, and Ren placed the bag in his outstretched palm. Hazel then bound the bag to Jaune’s shoulder so it wouldn’t shift and would still keep the joint cool, and stood up.

“Done.”

“Thanks, Hazel,” Jaune said as he stood up with his shirt in one hand. He extended his right hand to Hazel in a handshake, but the man was already turning away and walking back towards the crowd. There was something about the way that he walked that seemed slightly unnatural. Every single step seemed to be the same, and not in the way that a person’s usual steps are. It’s like these ones were calculated. Meticulous.

Nora came running up, and Hazel paused, stopping her and handing her a ten dollar bill and muttering something to her. Nora paused in confusion and glanced from Hazel to a still-shirtless Jaune, back to a Hazel that was already walking away from her, back to a Jaune that was now in the process of putting his shirt back on.

She stormed up and raised her hands in frustration, “Jesus Christ, Jaune! I lose track of you for like… five minutes and you dislocate your shoulder. And what do I come back to find you doing? Sitting there shirtless while a total hunk walks away.”

Ren stared pointedly at Nora for a second, who had to do a double take at him and tried to defend herself with, “What? He was a hunk!”

“What did he say?” Jaune asked as he moved his shoulder around and winced at the ache.

“He said to get you home and get something to dull the pain in you. Asprin if we have it, and he gave me money to get you a beer if we don’t.”

“Do we have Asprin?”

“No.”

“So beer it is,” Jaune said as he started to make his way to the beverage booth.

Pyrrha moved alongside him with worry still in her voice. “Are you sure that you’re alright?”

“Yeah… he seemed competent enough.”

“He didn’t say much.”

“Some people are just quiet, I suppose,” Jaune said as he glanced over at Ren, “We hang out with one pretty regularly.”

“I suppose,” Pyrrha said, as they continued to walk. She paused, then linked her arm through his after a second, finally showing that lack of restraint that Nora had talked about earlier.

Jaune felt his heart leap into his chest, but he relaxed into the contact with a satisfied smile. There was no amount of “not in my right mind” that could stop him from enjoying this.

Since the show was in full swing, the line for the beverage booth was relatively short. Nora used the ten that Hazel had given her to buy Jaune another Guinness, and left the change in the tip jar. She passed the beer to Jaune, who drank it eagerly. This was partly because he wanted the dull throbbing in his shoulder to go away, and partly because he was kind of thirsty and the beer felt nice rolling across his tongue.

He offered some to Pyrrha, who took the cup and enjoyed a few swallows, leaving about half for Nora. She started to protest when Jaune said, “Ren still has his flask, right? And he’s not going to be drinking because he has to drive all of our asses home.”

Nora took the point and finished off the beer, tossing the empty cup into a nearby trash can. The cup was immediately replaced with a pair of flasks. One was the flask that he had a nip from earlier after the mosh pit incident, the other was presumably still full. Nora kept the partially empty one for herself and passed the other off to Pyrrha and Jaune to share.

It went that way for a little bit, with the two of them sitting off to the side of the crowd, a ways away from the stage but still able to hear the music rather clearly, watching as the guitarists had a duel, flamethrowers blasting gouts of fire into the air, and the drummer going on an epic three-minute solo that seemed to have a miraculous amount of double bass the entire time.

It was nice, and, after a little while, Pyrrha’s head rested on Jaune’s shoulder in a gesture of affection. He didn’t mind. He had stopped even considering the idea of “not in my right mind” amounts and chose to simply enjoy the moment for what it was: calm, peaceful, and happy despite the fact that, a few hundred feet away, a group of men were playing very loud and boisterous music that had probably already set off a couple of alarms in the parking lot, singing songs about war, death, and the Fatherland.

Jaune could easily chalk this up as one of the best nights of his life. If it hadn’t been for the injuries, it would have definitely taken the cake.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's finally time for the four friends to head home, but not without some unforseen complications. This is not to say that these are bad things, however...

After about eight or nine more songs, Ren leaned over and said, “I think we should get going. I want to beat the rush out of here.”

“Yeah, that makes sense, Nora said, finishing off the flask that she’d been sipping on and handing it back to Ren. “We need to get Jaune home so he can change his ice. And I want to get out of this armor and into my pajamas. All the excitement has me bushed.”

“And you weren’t even the subject of most of the excitement,” Jaune said, offering one last belt to Pyrrha. She politely refused, and Jaune screwed the cap back on, handing it to Ren, who made it disappear into the folds of his coat.

“Yeah, I can’t imagine how you feel, Jaune,” Nora said with a chuckle as they stood up and started to make their way towards the exit. A couple of other groups of people had gotten the same idea as them, but not enough to clog up the parking lot and the highways away from the concert. “Do you think you’re going to feel like shit tomorrow?”

“Probably,” he confessed, and Pyrrha’s hand moved to link with his own. He looked over at her and saw that her cheeks were the red of ripe cherries, and that she couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. Her hand tightened on his own, though, just to let him know that this wasn’t some kind of farce.

Jaune had enough “not in my right mind” to make a bold move. He was slightly buzzed, injured, might wind up waking up with blood on his pillow from the cut on his eyebrow, and he was having the time of his life.

He leaned over and placed a soft kiss on Pyrrha’s cheek.

If he had eyes in the back of his head, he would have seen Nora and Ren standing behind them, both with similar expressions of shock and excitement on their faces. Ren held up a hand and offered Nora a fistbump. Nora returned it and even did the explosive wiggly fingers to showcase her exuberance in that moment.

However, because Jaune did not have eyes in the back of his head, all he saw was Pyrrha. She blinked a couple of times, paused, then looked up at him with a questioning expression.

Jaune responded by leaning in closer to kiss her again, and she got up on her tiptoes to meet him halfway.

Naturally, due to the sheer bliss of the moment, neither Jaune nor Pyrrha saw Nora silently losing her shit just behind them. She kept on looking at Ren, then back to the kissing couple with her mouth wide open as if she was screaming, but all that managed to escape her throat was a barely audible “hhhhhhhhh.”

She made grandiose, bordering on flailing gestures at the two of them as if to scream, “SEE THIS IS THE SHIT THAT I’VE BEEN EXPECTING TO HAPPEN FOR EIGHTEEN MONTHS.” Of course, she couldn’t scream it because it would ruin the moment, so she just continued flailing.

Jaune and Pyrrha broke the kiss and continued walking.

“That was nice,” Jaune commented, almost dreamily.

“Mmm…” Pyrrha responded, rendered nonverbal by the reciprocation of her affections.

“Hey, Pyrrha?”

“Mm?”

“Did you kiss me back because of the alcohol or adrenaline high?”

“Mm-mm.”

“You mean you’ve actually wanted to do that for a while.”

“Mm-hm~” she practically sang, leaning her head against his uninjured shoulder once again, a contented smile on her face. This dispelled any and all notions that Jaune might have had about her lying to him just to save his feelings. Needless to say, he was feeling a lot better about the whole thing now that everything was out in the open.

Behind them, Nora was losing her goddamn mind, and neither of them noticed.

They got to the entrance again, and the security guys asked if they were going to be coming back in, a stamp for the inside of their wrist at the ready if they did, and they collectively answered that no, they were headed home.

Searching for Ren’s car was a bit of a problem because the car was old enough that it didn’t have one of the key fobs that he could press and make it light up or honk in order to figure out its location, nor did the car stand out in any particular way. To top it all off, aside from the pickup trucks, the vast majority of the parking lot seemed to be filled with a dull, uninteresting rainbow of the same sedan.

There were multiple points where Ren wound up going up to a car of a completely different color before Nora reminded him, “Ren, your car is green,” and he had to move on to the next row in a slight fit of embarrassment.

This process went on for the better part of fifteen minutes, with Nora even going so far as to say “Sweetie, I think we’re in the completely wrong place.” Jaune and Pyrrha, of course, found it to be highly amusing.

Ren did not.

It got to the point where they had to try and find his car based on license plate, and Ren remembered his well enough that it became clear very quickly that this was not the first time that something like this had happened.

Even so, it took them another ten minutes to find the right car. In the process, they wound up running into another group that had a very similar problem.

“Hey, you’re checking license plates?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you happen to see C42-BFG?”

“I think I saw that one the next row over.”

“Thanks.”

Finally, after almost a half an hour of meandering through the parking lot, Ren let out a cry of jubilation at finding his “baby”. “Baby,” in this context, meaning a car that couldn’t stand out to save its life, which, of course, resulted in a great deal of frustration due to the sheer number of cars that couldn’t stand out to save their lives in the parking lot.

Everyone piled in, though the seating arrangements were slightly different this time around. Nora took shotgun, and Pyrrha sat in the backseat with Jaune so they could still hold hands. During the search, Nora had managed to snag Ren’s half-full flask and polish it off, resulting in her being quite tipsy.

This particularly came through in her language.

“Reeeeeeen. Ren. Why aren’t we home yet.”

Ren didn’t respond. The car shuddered to life and the engine gave a depressing rumble as Ren started to pull out of the parking lot.

“Jaune,” Nora said, switching her attentions to someone that would actually respond to her when she spoke to them, “Why did you get your ass kicked so much? You really shouldn’t have gotten your ass kicked so much. I didn’t get my ass kicked that much when I went to my first concert.”

“You’re also very small and adorable, and people don’t like fighting adorable,” Jaune responded. His thumb moved against the back of Pyrrha’s idly, like a metronome that kept affection rather than time. Pyrrha gave a pleased sigh and cozied up to him a little more, just happy that her affections were finally being returned after all this time.

“I am pretty adorable, aren’t I?” Nora said, reaching up and smooshing her cheeks to prove her point, “I’m the most adorable. One-hundred percent adorable but I’ll kick your ass.” She glanced over at Pyrrha and pointed at her. Ren pulled onto the highway. “You hear that, Pyrrha? I’m going to kick your boyfriend’s ass.”

Pyrrha glanced up at Jaune with a smile and said, “I think my boyfriend will be fine.”

“You’re not going to stand up for me?” Jaune asked in mock exasperation.

“Nah. You’ll be fine,” she responded. Nora cracked her knuckles in the front seat and Ren cautioned her to not start anything while the car was in motion.

“Wait until we stop to drop him off. Then kick his ass.”

Nora pouted and flopped back into her seat, folding her arms and grumbling something about delivering an ass-whooping on the spot.

“Actually,” Pyrrha spoke up, “I want to make sure that Jaune’s bandages are okay. I’ll get off with him.”

Jaune paused, his heart leaping into his throat as his hand suddenly felt sweaty and clammy against hers. “I… um…” In a split second, Jaune was back to being that nervous guy that couldn’t tell someone how he felt. His “not in my right mind” tank was full, but there appeared to be something wrong with his train of thought because it was badly in danger of being derailed.

Pyrrha’s expression turned sad and she muttered, “I’m sorry. I’m moving too fast for you, aren’t I?”

“No!” Jaune blurted out, and the statement was so sudden that it made Ren jump and Nora start paying attention to the conversation behind her once more.

“I’ll probably mess up the binding, and I’m only able to use one hand to do it,” Jaune explained, searching for words and making things up as he went along, “It’ll probably be better if you handle it. I mean, you’ve probably had to do stuff like this before in the dojo, right?”

Pyrrha nodded, “Usually, it’s a sprained ankle. I haven’t had to do a shoulder before.”

“Well, we don’t need to completely rewrap it. Just do enough to replace the ice pack.”

“I see.”

“And… if you want, you can crash at my place. It’s going to be pretty hard to get a cab on my end of town this late at night and I don’t want you walking home alone.”

Pyrrha paused and said, “I’d like that, Jaune. I’d like that a lot.”

From the front seat, Nora said, “Be careful, Pyrrha. Knowing his luck tonight, you’re probably going to break his pelvis when you two have sex.”

Jaune’s mouth dropped open and he stared at Nora. Pyrrha covered her face in embarrassment and shook her head in embarrassment at the notion. Ren did the most reasonable thing. He had removed the gauntlets and given them back to Nora, so it probably didn’t hurt too much when he reached over and wordlessly smacked her upside the head.

Nora took the hint, muttered an apology, and turned to face forward once again, leaving the couple in the darkness behind them.

Pyrrha was still a mess of embarrassment, despite Nora’s apology, and kept on shaking her head in the palms of her hands, as if she could shake off whatever the hell Nora had said and get the imagery away from her.

Jaune kissed the crown of her head and moved his arm around her shoulders to reassure her.

It worked.

Pyrrha relaxed, knowing that he wasn’t taking Nora seriously, and the car stayed silent all the way home, save for Sabaton’s “World War Two” album wafting out of the speakers. Ren eventually pulled up outside of Jaune’s apartment building and let him and Pyrrha out.

“Let me know when you two get home safe,” Pyrrha said to Ren as she got out.

“Will do. Have a nice night,” Ren said.

“Hey, Ren?” Jaune asked, reaching forward to rest his hand on his shoulder. He glanced over at Nora in the passenger seat, seeing that she was dozing quietly, soft snores coming with each inhale. “When Nora wakes up, tell her that I said ‘thanks for inviting me along’. I had a great time.”

“Even though you got hurt quite a bit?”

“Even then.”

Ren nodded and offered Jaune a knuckle tap, which he returned eagerly, and the car pulled away once Jaune stepped out and closed the door behind him. Pyrrha stood over by the front door to the apartment building, a smile on her face, somehow making the black metal-studded pants and leather vest look like a prom dress because of how she stood.

“Hello, you,” she said with a smile, black lipstick and winged eyeliner unmarred despite the evening.

“Hey, you,” he responded as he moved over to her and pulled open the door. “After you.”

They took the elevator because of their exhaustion. It would have been a dick move, but it was half past midnight and it didn’t seem likely that anyone was going to be doing any kind of moving at this hour of the evening unless they were coming home from a night out or an evening shift at their job. Even so, considering that this was a bit more of a quiet community with people that tended to work nine-to-five jobs and had one or two kids, it was unlikely that anyone would be going anywhere at this hour of the evening.

It also meant that Mrs. Sanders would probably be asleep and therefore unable to judge Jaune’s battered appearance or Pyrrha’s choice of dress, which was probably going to be the greatest blessing of the evening.

They got inside Jaune’s apartment and he immediately began apologizing and tidying up some of the mess that is to be expected in the room of a young, single man. Pyrrha watched him with a little smile, imagining him just going about his day to day life, enjoying his own domestic virtues and vices.

Granted, it wasn’t hard. She already knew that he practically lived in his pajamas when he wasn’t dressed to go somewhere, and that he always tried to cook himself dinner instead of going out. The TV had no cable, but was wired up so he could get Netflix (he and Nora had gone in on a subscription together, and had used a dummy email so neither of them could really “hack” the other), and she knew that he’d spent many an hour lounging on the couch, binge-watching some show or another on his days off.

More than anything else, she wanted to cozy up on that couch with him and watch an entire season of anime in a single sitting, maybe pausing for snacks about halfway through.

“Yeah, so… I can sleep on the couch, you can have my bed. I’ll tidy up the bedroom a little bit in just a… second,” he said as he dashed off to the room to at least make it look like a normally functioning human being lived there instead of a guy that walked in, stripped out of his clothes, and faceplanted onto the bed more nights than not.

“Make yourself at home,” he called out to her as he got out of his boots and organized them with the rest of his shoes along one wall. He tossed a couple more pieces of laundry into a hamper and straightened up the bed before nodding in satisfaction at how his abode looked. He reached into one of his drawers and pulled out a spare pair of pajamas and a white undershirt before coming out of the bedroom. Pyrrha sat at the little table he had set up in the kitchen for meals and was just taking everything in quietly.

“I… uh… You can borrow some of my pajamas,” he said as he handed them over to her.

“Thank you, Jaune,” she responded as she stood up and took them. “Do you mind if I go and get changed?”

“No!” he said, as if the question should have offended him, “No, uh… go ahead. Bedroom is in there, bathroom is straight away if you need it. I’ll get you a bag for your clothes so… yeah. Hang on.”

Pyrrha watched him with a little smile on her lips. Jaune didn’t seem like the kind of person to have guests over often, so his nervousness at the appearance of his place was more than warranted in addition to completely and totally adorkable.

He reached into one of his drawers and pulled out a canvas bag that would be big enough to hold any and everything that Pyrrha had brought with her, with the exception of her shoes. He handed it over awkwardly and shifted from foot to foot, not really knowing what to say.

Pyrrha knew what to say.

She went over and gave him a kiss on the cheek as well as a “thank you” before going off into his room. She immediately made a beeline for the bathroom so she could clean up, and closed the door behind her.

She heard him go into his bedroom after she closed the door, but he left and closed the bedroom door behind him. Pyrrha assumed that he was only coming in to get his pajamas before leaving her to some privacy.

The clothes he’d loaned her were pretty utilitarian: plaid flannel bottoms and a sturdy cotton top. Pyrrha smiled at the thought of Jaune just wandering around in these all day, and figured that she would have to surprise him with a weekend visit. That wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, she assumed. After all, they were dating now, even if they hadn’t been on a technical “date”.

Surprisingly, the bathroom was easily the neatest part of Jaune’s house, with barely any grime or dirt on the sink and tub, as well as his sparse arrangement of toiletries laid out in a rather organized manner. She figured that, because of his line of work, this place would be absolutely filthy unless he gave it a weekly shakedown.

She peeled the leather vest off, her sweat causing the lining to stick to her ever so slightly, and unhooked her bra to cast both in the bag. She pulled on the shirt and enjoyed the nice, clean scent of fabric softener on it, taking solace in the fact that he at least knew how to do laundry the right way. 

She closed the lid of the toilet and sat down to unlace her boots, tugging them off and setting them aside. What followed were her socks, balled up and tossed in with the rest of her discarded clothes.

Finally, it was time for Pyrrha to remove the monstrosity that was the pants she wore.

Luckily for her, it was an easy enough task. Remove belt, everything falls down under its own weight. She coiled up the belt like it was a piece of rope and folded her pants before pulling on the pajama bottoms that Jaune had loaned her, the cozy feeling of warm flannel making her feel at home more than anything but Jaune himself had done so far.

After washing her face free of makeup, unbinding her hair from its rings, and using a spare hair tie that she’d left on her wrist to put it up in her usual ponytail, Pyrrha felt human again. She opened the bathroom door and was greeted by a couple of pleasant sensations.

First and foremost, Jaune had put on some quiet instrumental music on the stereo in the living room, music that inspired a walk through the forest on a cool autumn day. Secondly, he appeared to be making something to eat. From the smell of it, he was making some basic bacon and eggs.

“I forgot to ask how you like your eggs, but I figured that I couldn’t really go wrong with scrambled,” he said as she stepped into the main room. She set her boots and her bag aside before coming up behind him to give him a hug. He didn’t stop, but he did acknowledge her presence by turning his head and blowing a quick kiss at her since he couldn’t kiss her properly.

“It smells good,” she murmured, just enjoying the whole situation, “It smells really good…”

“I figured that I should do something nice for you,” he responded with a little shrug. The shrug made him wince, but he made sure that she didn’t realize it. “If you wouldn’t mind, could you get another bag of ice so we can swap this one out? I have sandwich bags in the drawer right there,” he said as he used the spatula to point at the drawer in question.

Pyrrha let him go, almost reluctantly, and went to the drawer to pull one of the sandwich bags in question out of the box. She opened up the freezer and saw a pair of half-full ice cube trays inside, and emptied one of them into the bag. She refilled it (only an asshole puts an empty ice cube tray back into the freezer), and set the bag of ice on the counter. By the time she was done, Jaune was plating their late-night snack.

“You sit down and eat,” Pyrrha said, “Let me take a look at that shoulder of yours.”

He obliged half of that statement. He sat down, but he didn’t eat; the food was for both of them to enjoy together. She helped him out of his shirt, and he groaned slightly as his shoulder was moved in new and interesting ways that it did not particularly care for. Redressing the injury was supposed to be a relatively quick process, but Pyrrha’s fingers lingered in contact with his skin, causing Jaune’s face to light up a little bit.

“Does it still hurt?” Pyrrha asked as she replaced the ice bag and started to wrap the bandage around it again.

“Yeah. Hazel said it would be like that for a week or so, though.”

“It doesn’t look like the swelling is too bad,” Pyrrha responded as she pulled the bandage tight, prompting a wince from Jaune. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. I guess I’m just a bit of a drama king,” he confessed before he looked up at her.

The warm, yellow light from the light fixture in the ceiling lit up Pyrrha’s hair so it looked like red gold, and the way she was situated, the light was shining from directly behind her, giving her an aura that seemed heavenly if not outright angelic. “You look beautiful,” he said quietly, the words escaping his lips despite himself.

Pyrrha paused for a second, her fingers moving away from his shoulder before the rested on his chest, barely there, not even pushing or pulling away. Just… resting.

“Jaune?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you sleep in your bed tonight?”

“You want to take the couch?”

“I…” Pyrrha paused here, biting her lower lip, “I want you to sleep next to me.”

The way she said it made it seem like the most bashful request for sex in the world, and Jaune felt like the hesitation he experienced made it seem that way in true.

“Do you really want that?”

Pyrrha nodded. Slowly, shyly, but she nodded and whispered, “I do.”

“I think I can contain my tendency to sprawl for one night,” he responded as he stood up. “But first, let’s eat.”

Pyrrha nodded and took a seat while Jaune (choosing to keep the shirt off) went and got their late-night snack. It was a modest repast –two strips of bacon and some scrambled eggs- but it spoke volumes about Jaune.

First, he at least was competent enough in the kitchen to make a decent meal, even if it was simple in nature.

Second, he had the quirky habit of putting steak sauce on his eggs, which Pyrrha pointed out as she put a dash of pepper on hers.

“I like having a little extra flavor,” he said to defend himself.

“You think that eggs don’t have flavor?”

“Not enough.”

That made Pyrrha laugh, and her bare foot found its way to nudging Jaune’s under the table. He finished before she did and just took the dishes to the sink, leaving them there and returning to the table. Pyrrha finished not long after, and he cleaned up for her.

“You go ahead and get to bed. I’ll be there in a second,” he said and made sure that the front door and the windows were locked, then turned out the lights and stopped the stereo.

Pyrrha sat on Jaune’s bed and lay there for a moment, inhaling his scent off the pillow. It was a rich, earthen smell that made Pyrrha want to curl up and snuggle the pillow she rested her head on. She reached over and flicked off the nightstand light, already enjoying the feeling of sleeping in this bed.

Not long afterwards, the weight of the bed shifted and Pyrrha found an arm curling around her from behind. “Hey,” he said, nuzzling her neck and kissing her pulse.

“Hey,” Pyrrha responded, turning her head so they could share a kiss. She turned around in his grasp as their lips met, and she pushed him back so he was on his back and she was lying on top of him.

Naturally, his hands wandered up to her back and slipped underneath her shirt, callused fingers pressing into her skin and taking in every inch of her.

Pyrrha never knew that something so simple as that small touch could feel so thrilling. Her lips parted in arousal and she softly ground into him, her hips moving slightly to press into him harder.

It didn’t take long for his body to show its response. Jaune’s erection prodded Pyrrha in the leg, and she gave him a slow smile.

“Is that a sword in your pocket?” she asked teasingly, her hand moving down to stroke him slightly. Jaune arched into her touch with a moan, shifting so he strained even more against the fabric of his pajamas.

“Mmmmnnno… I’m just kinda happy to see you,” he said, finishing the line and letting out a sharp gasp as she pulled his pants down just enough to expose his member. Pyrrha stroked him teasingly, and Jaune had to bite down on his lip to stop further sounds from escaping.

Pyrrha smiled and continued to stroke him while she kissed him once more, causing him to try and lean up into her touch, but paused as he broke the kiss with a wince.

Pyrrha pulled back and cocked her head, stopping any and all ministration to him. “Something wrong?”

“Just aching all over. I think all the bruises from the concert are finally starting to show their faces…” He glanced down at his erection and frowned, “I don’t think I can do this tonight, Pyrrha. I mean, I really want to, but I just don’t think I… physically can tonight. I mean, I physically can, but it’s probably going to hurt like a bitch if I do, and I would rather focus on pleasing you than being in pain.”

Pyrrha was a little upset, but she leaned over to kiss him once again. “You took quite a beating tonight, huh?”

“If I knew the night was going to end up like this,” Jaune said as he fixed his pajama bottoms and hid his length once again. He pulled the blanket over himself and continued, “I don’t think I would ever have gone into the mosh pit in the first place. Or let Nora drag me to the Wall of Death.”

Pyrrha chuckled and laid down, her back to him, “You can still spoon me, right? That won’t hurt?”

“Sure,” He responded, laying flush to the sine curve of her body, “So long as you don’t mind one of my hands being a bit adventurous.”

“You put that amorous limb right where it belongs, right this second,” Pyrrha said contentedly, and he obliged her.

His injured arm moved slowly, partially for the anticipation, partially because he didn’t want to twinge it again, and snaked around her waist and just under the edge of her shirt. Pyrrha’s breath hitched and she let out a soft moan, enamored by that touch alone. Jaune moved the hand further up along her belly, feeling the hard muscle she had cultivated as years of a martial artist, and higher until he cupped one of her full breasts. Pyrrha purred and murmured, “You remove that hand, and I’ll know.”

Jaune kissed the back of her neck, just below her hairline, and said, “You’ll kick my ass?”

“No,” Pyrrha responded, drowsily, “I’ll call Nora to do it for me.”

“I’d rather you did it.”

“I know.”

Jaune placed another kiss on her neck as response and she cozied into him further. Pyrrha let out a squeaking yawn (so adorable that Jaune almost felt the need to comment), and slowly fell asleep.

Pyrrha snored.

Jaune almost laughed at the notion, realizing that this woman, the hard as nails lady of war that had beat the living fuck out of someone that had the balls to solicit, then grab her while she was surrounded by a boatload of asskicking defenders, was more than capable of being cute. She did it unconsciously, especially while she was unconscious.

Slowly but surely, Jaune surrendered to the soft grip of sleep, and he remained curled around Pyrrha if only so he could fall asleep with the smell of her skin being the last thing in his memory before dreams claimed him.

She smelled like cut grass in the summer, and the lemonade that followed. It reminded him of a good memory of childhood, and of the many kind things that he remembered about his family.

The dreams that followed were not exactly nightmares, nor were they pleasant dreams. A conscious Jaune would claim that it was impossible to have nightmares when his arms were around Pyrrha (a notion that would eventually be disproved by a vision of hillbillies with banjos that they strummed with dildos. He would have this dream after watching Deliverance twice in the same day), but the truth was that his dreams were just… strange.

He found himself juggling aluminum baseball bats painted in a variety of neon colors while clowns danced around him with chest-mounted coolers full of ice cream. Even within the dream, he lamented not meeting the Mad Clowns due to the nature of ice cream’s mere presence being soothing to injury.


	5. Chapter 5

When sleep finally decided, “alright, I’m done with this dude,” and Mr. Sandman drifted off to screw with some other dingus, Jaune awoke before Pyrrha.

Unfortunately, there was a problem with how they had fallen asleep.

As is always the tragedy of the big spoon, Jaune’s good arm was pinned underneath Pyrrha. It wasn’t to the point of cutting off circulation or even making his fingers fall asleep, but it was a case of him not being able to extricate the limb due to how Pyrrha was situated.

If she was still asleep and not in that kind of half-awake/half-asleep daydream state, she would still wake up if he had tried to move his arm out from underneath her.

He would simply have to suffer until she woke up without his interference.

When one is pinned down, there are a variety of things that they can take their time to consider: shapes that show up in the stucco of one’s ceiling, the exact plan for one’s day, or the various features of the person that has one pinned down in the first place.

Since Jaune had spent many a sleepless night staring up at his ceiling and picking out shapes like they were constellations in an off-white sky, and he already knew that he was mostly going to stay at home and clean a little after he helped Mrs. Sanders move around her furniture (he wondered how he was going to do that with an injured shoulder), he decided to go with the third option, and took in as much of Pyrrha as he could, considering his position.

He had to stay still, lest she wake up, and she could probably carry through on her promise that she would know when his hand pulled away from her chest. Despite himself, however, his thumb moved idly, caressing the smooth skin of her ample breast ever so slightly.

As if responding to the quiet, gentle motion, Pyrrha gave a quiet murmur and curled into him even more. Her rump shifted slightly against his crotch in such a way that he was at full mast in a matter of seconds, and hoped that the prodding wouldn’t wake her up.

Even as she moved against him, he couldn’t help but admire how the light played across her skin. He saw the golden rays of morning spilling through his open window like Sif’s hair and flitted across her face. The motes of dust drifting around, shone like burnished diamonds in the light, and Pyrrha’s skin looked like that of angels, her hair appearing as the radiant halo of a long-awaited sunset, copper set ablaze despite the snarls it accumulated in her sleep.

Jaune figured that was just the curse of having long hair, though: waking up every day and having to brush the hell out of it because of how it had shifted and tangled on itself in the middle of the night.

Even so, Jaune found that he loved every inch of her.

An idea entered its way into his head. It was an idea that seemed like a fucking fantastic plan to someone that was still in the process of waking up and currently found the perfect woman in his arms. He decided to kiss her on the neck, all romance-y.

Unfortunately, those arms that he found the perfect woman residing in were currently occupied with holding her and ensuring that she did not wake up, so he would have to get creative.

He would have to do this entire task with his mouth, and there was a mane of red hair in the way. Jaune, in his still-awakening state, began to use his mouth to gently pull aside strands of hair, letting them fall free and exposing the skin underneath one bit at a time.

The problem came into play when too much hair started to stick to Jaune’s mouth. He sputtered and spat, trying to do so as quietly as possible, but Pyrrha started giggling nevertheless.

Jaune stared at her for a second, strands of red still lingering on his lips. He tried to blow the last strands away to no avail. He removed the hand from up under Pyrrha’s shirt and pulled the hair away from his mouth, and stared at her in confusion.

“How long have you been awake?”

“I woke up when you did, Jaune,” Pyrrha said, rolling over and leaning up to give him a kiss. “Though, if I knew you were going to start snacking on my hair, I would have said something sooner.”

“I wasn’t snacking.”

“What were you doing, then?”

“I was going to try and wake you up by kissing you on the neck, but my hands were occupied.”

“Occupied with being pinned down by my head and groping me?”

“You say ‘groping’ like it wasn’t consensual.”

“Fondling, then.”

“Better, but not by much,” Jaune said, and extricated his arm out from under her. He leaned over and gave her a kiss in return, “Morning, Pyrrha. Sleep well?”

Pyrrha raised her arms up over her head and stretched. Down the way, under the comforter, Jaune could see Pyrrha’s toes curl slightly as she got the last of sleep out of her system with a mighty yawn and a quiet grunt as she began to pop a few of her joints simply by flexing. For a moment, Jaune could do nothing but admire her control over her own body, and sat back so she could finish waking up properly.

“I slept well. Better than I have in a while, actually,” she said, and rolled over so she could face him. She didn’t want to tell him that she had been dreaming of him even when he was right there with her because that was probably going to sound cheesy as all hell.

“How does the arm feel?” she asked, reaching out to the Ace bandage wrapped around his shoulder and a now-sloshing bag of water.

“Better. I think not sleeping on it definitely helped,” he responded, and stood up to undo some of the wrapping. “Give me a second,” he said as he took the bag of water out from under the wrapping and put it on his nightstand.

Pyrrha watched him with casual interest, a sly smile showing up on her lips. She scooted over to him and hugged him from behind as he set the bag of water aside, placing a kiss on the back of his shoulder. “Feeling well enough for some extracurricular activities?” she asked, teasingly.

Jaune jolted, more from the question than the sudden contact, and swallowed a hard lump in his throat before he responded in a way that was definitely not casual and certainly nervous, “Is that what we’re calling it, now?”

“Would you prefer that I ask you outright instead of using euphemisms?”

“I think that would be interesting to hear at the very least.”

“Jaune, I want you to fuck me right here and now.” She said this quietly, almost as if she was ashamed to say it out of fear that someone would hear aside from the intended. Jaune could understand why. Hearing Pyrrha say such a thing, to hear her swear, was like finding a unicorn made of sin. You didn’t know it could exist in the first place, but god damn if it doesn’t leave you with conflicted and confused feelings.

Jaune blinked a couple of times, processing the question as well as he could. Admittedly, he was only processing it insomuch as someone from the 1850s could comprehend the phrase “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”. It was so ridiculously illogical and alien to him that he needed to take a moment to understand it.

The moment, unfortunately, took too long.

Pyrrha’s gaze shifted away from him and she rolled over to the other side of the bed, swinging her legs over the side and standing up. “I’m… I’m going to take a quick shower. Is that alright?”

Jaune had finally processed the whole situation and realized that he’d fucked up. He started to say something, but nothing came out as he watched Pyrrha walk over to the bathroom and close the door behind her. He started to hear the water run, and realized that he needed some… “professional” help.

He decided to text Nora.

Jaune A.: Nora. You awake?  
Nora V.: She’s still asleep. This is Ren. What’s up, Jaune?  
Jaune A.: Pyrrha just asked me to have sex with her and I fucked up.  
Nora V.: I’m waking Nora up.

It took a couple of minutes, but Nora eventually messaged him back.

Nora V.: tell me everything. Now.  
Jaune A.: She spent the night. We’re kind of official. She asked me to have sex with her and I froze.  
Nora V.: where is she now.  
Jaune A.: She’s in the shower.  
Nora V.: GET IN THERE.  
Jaune A.: What? No.  
Nora V.: shower sex is great sex.  
Jaune A.: You think all sex is great sex.  
Nora V.: Nooooo…  
Jaune A.: Get to the point.  
Nora V.: act all coy. Ask each step of the way. Knock, ask if you can come into the bathroom. Hell, bring her a change of clothes for when you two are done. Then ask if you can join her in the shower.  
Jaune A.: Does that work?  
Nora V.: Always worked on me when Ren did it.  
Jaune A.: So much makes sense now…

He left it at that and set the phone aside, going into his drawers and removing a dark red t-shirt with a brighter red gear pattern on the center of it. He usually only busted out that shirt on a certain day in April, but he would loan it to Pyrrha for the time being. A pair of black cargo shorts joined the pile as well as (after a moment’s consideration, a pair of cream-colored boxers.

He lingered by the bathroom door and knocked quietly, calling out, “Pyrrha? I have a change of clothes for you. Can I come in?”

A moment of silence, then, “Yes. The curtain’s closed.”

Jaune stepped into the bathroom and Pyrrha’s discarded clothes neatly folded and arranged in a pile on top of the toilet’s tank. Jaune set the fresh clothes on the closed toilet lid and leaned against the sink counter. “I wanted to apologize, Pyrrha,” he said, bowing his head and choosing his words very carefully.

“It’s alright, Jaune. I was moving a little too fast and your response was appropriate,” Pyrrha said, trying to put the blame on herself as always.

“No, it’s not alright,” he responded, shaking his head. “You put yourself out there in a way that I had never seen before, and I didn’t respond in a way that either of us wanted. I was shocked to hear you so ready to be with me in that sense that I hadn’t taken it into consideration how you would bring it up, and I didn’t consider your feelings.”

He could tell that Pyrrha paused simply because of how the falling water changed, and Pyrrha said, “It’s alright, Jaune.” There was mirth and light in her voice, “We can try again after I come out.”

“Actually,” Jaune said, nerves flaring up again, “I was wondering if I could come in and join you.”

Silence for a moment, save for the hiss of the shower, then, “Of course.”

Jaune stripped down in a matter of seconds, kicking his clothes into a small pile by the door, then pulled the curtain aside and poked his head into the shower proper.

She was beautiful. Well, she had always been beautiful, but it was even more apparent now. Pyrrha’s trademark cherry-red hair was now the color of dried blood, pasted down to her skin as she let the water run through it. Her back was turned to him and he got a perfect view of how the muscles moved under her skin when her arms shifted, and how her back seemed to slowly but surely give way to her narrow hips and firm rear. Jaune stepped into the shower, and Pyrrha’s hands paused on her hair as he moved behind her and rested his hands on her waist. He moved his head around to face her fully, and placed a soft kiss on her cheek.

As if she had been waiting for him to touch her nude form all the time she’d known him, Pyrrha let out a shuddering breath and rested her head on his shoulder, one hand resting on one of Jaune’s while the other moved up to cup his cheek and kiss him deeply.

They melted into one another, and Pyrrha turned around in his touch, pressing her chest into his in order to make the kiss closer and deeper. Her hands down to give his rear a firm squeeze and press his hips flush against hers. His member, already warm and throbbing, slipped between her thighs easily, brushing against her aching nethers.

“I… mmm…” Jaune said, interrupted by the kisses that she continued to press to his lips. “I forgot to bring a condom. I’m sorry.”

“I’m on the pill. It’s okay,” she explained as she kissed him more fervently. She had the foresight to bring a two-day bag with her in one of the many pockets of her pants, containing all of her vitamins and meds to last her two days, heaven forbid she find herself in a situation away from home.

She kissed Jaune tenderly, her hands running up and down his back as the warm water coursed along their skin. She felt his length pulsing against her, and let out a soft moan as she imagined what it would feel like inside. Jaune’s hands moved down to her rear and gave it a soft squeeze, prompting a giggle from Pyrrha at the notion.

“And here I was, thinking you wouldn’t be able to stop playing with my cleavage,” she said, burying her face against his neck and trailing kisses all along it.

“I was doing that all night, though,” Jaune said, “You did kind of threaten me by leaving a vague mention of what would happen if I stopped.

“Mm… true…” Pyrrha purred as he ran his hands along her rear and thighs and gave his butt a playful squeeze. She gave a giggle as he let out a quiet “eep!” and she nuzzled into his shoulder before saying, “I’ve been wanting to do that for a while. You have a nice butt.”

“And you have a nice… well, everything…” Jaune said. He really did not have a way with words this morning. He figured he’d have to let his actions speak for him.

He placed his lips onto her neck, gently kissing her and moving his hands so he wasn’t playing with her butt anymore, but instead choosing to take control of the situation. The warm water sprayed across their skin and coursed down their bodies in quick-moving rivers, and Jaune’s fingers coasted just above those rivers like a heron in flight, touching down where they wanted to be.

He laced one hand’s fingers with her own, and the other went between her legs, rubbing softly at first, then a little bit harder. Pyrrha’s lips parted in surprise and ecstasy, her own free hand moving to grab onto his uninjured shoulder. Even at this slight stimulation, she was growing slightly weak in the knees, letting out gasping breaths and soft moans.

“Do you want me to stop?” Jaune asked, his fingers pausing slightly, realizing that the action might be unwanted, despite their state of undress and attraction towards one another.

“No… please… oh god, I need that…” she said, practically grinding herself onto his hand if it meant even the slightest bit of stimulation.

Jaune obliged her, slipping one finger inside her, causing her whole body to quiver and her to go weak in the knees. Her grip on Jaune was probably the only thing holding her up, and his footing shifted as he felt it. She let out another shuddering sigh and started to plant sweet, gentle kisses on her lover’s neck, murmuring gentle things into his ear, things that he couldn’t really make out because they were mainly a panoply of noises that hitched slightly in pitch as his thumb found her clit and started to stimulate it slightly.

Even so, there were a few things that he could make out.

“Oh god, Jaune…”

“Please…”

“More…”

Most of the murmurs were variations on these same three sentences, but he did manage to make out a fourth sentence that was almost so quiet that he couldn’t hear it.

“I love you.”

It took her so long to say it that Pyrrha thought she was going to explode with a heart full of white light. Even amidst the debauchery and the sin that they were engaged in, she felt so full of life and love that she knew that she could say such a thing and not be worried about the repercussions.

He slipped another finger inside her, no longer teasing her clit, and Pyrrha’s voice hitched in excitement, her head tilting up to the ceiling as the water, now feeling cool against the heat of her skin, splashed across the two of them. Jaune pressed his lips against her pulse, tracing gentle kisses along her neck and jawline until he got to just under her earlobe. Her breath was shuddering, quivering in anticipation. She knew that he was going to say something, and her prayers were answered when he responded as expected.

“I love you too, Pyrrha.”

As if the words were a trigger, the simple sensation of his breath along her ear was enough to drive her over the edge. She let out a sharp cry, barely stifled. The hand that was holding his own moved to grab the back of his injured shoulder, causing him to wince, and she felt a little weak in the knees. Once again, he was probably holding her up.

Jaune withdrew his fingers from her, prompting a final quake and a purr of satisfaction from her lips. Out of curiosity, his tongue snaked out and licked her juices from his fingers. She was a little sweet, a little spicy, not unlike Mexican hot chocolate. He made an internal note to go down on her in the near future. Not today, since he was already too hurt because of the metal concert. He would have to wait until another day for her to crush his head between his thighs.

“I feel so light,” Pyrrha said, her legs still rubbery as she tried to support herself in the shower, using him as a handhold. She rested her forehead on his cheek, and he turned to place a quick kiss to her temple.

“Really? Because you’re feeling a little heavy from my end,” Jaune said in as playful a voice as he could muster. There wasn’t really a playful way to say “hey, I’m injured and you’re hanging on me like a goddamn koala.” Rather, if there was a way, Jaune didn’t know it, and he would have been glad to find out in this particular moment.

Pyrrha immediately apologized and forced her feet to plant themselves beneath her so she could stand upright, and found that the water felt ice cold compared to her skin in this moment.

It made her shiver again, though only this time in the standard unpleasant manner.

Jaune felt the thrill run through her skin and suddenly became aware of the chill of the water on his flesh. He couldn’t quite tell if his body had just grown so hot from arousal and excitement or if they had drained the last of the hot water heater for the time being.

The first wasn’t really a problem. The second was that if there was no hot water on a Saturday, then Jaune had probably woken up pretty damn late.

Naturally, this presented a veritable plethora of problems simply by virtue of what he had promised Ms. Sanders the night before.

However, Jaune paid the promise he made Ms. Sanders absolutely no mind because of one simple fact: he was about as hard as steel at the moment, and there was a beautiful woman in front of him that loved him and was welcoming to the notion.

Nevertheless, Jaune reached out and turned the water off, the showerhead sputtering to a stop as all showerheads in barely reputable apartment buildings do. Pyrrha almost pouted (only almost) and stared at him with concern.

“You’re only going to pleasure me and think you’re going to walk away scot free? No, sir, mister!” Pyrrha said as her hand made a wanton leap for the throbbing shaft that just barely managed to leap out of her reach because Jaune wasn’t that much of an idiot and saw the action coming.

“I made a prior arrangement. You were there for it,” Jaune said defensively, backing towards the door of the bathroom and holding his hands up to stop any further advancement on Pyrrha’s part.

Not halfway, but fully this time, Pyrrha pouted.

Jaune felt a little bit bad, but he ducked out of the bathroom. He awkwardly pointed at the pile of clothes he’d left for her as he escaped, saying, “I gave you a pair of boxers, some shorts, and a t-shirt sorry I don’t have any bras lying around.”

As the door closed behind him, Pyrrha couldn’t help but stifle a giggle.

This was the guy she’d fallen in love with: considerate, always keeps his promises, and absolutely awkward when he was caught off-guard.

She stepped out of the bathtub and chuckled to herself as she grabbed the thick, cottony towel that hung on a rack just to her right, and dried herself off. Seeing as she was not a fan of that twisty thing with her hair, she simply dried her hair off and searched (vainly, perhaps) for a hairbrush.

Gods be damned, if she couldn’t find a hairbrush, she would break all the goddamn teeth in Jaune’s comb if it meant somewhat taming her relatively heinous mane. Some would consider this bad girlfriend etiquette. Some are stupid.

However, since Pyrrha did not fall in love with an absolute fucknuts, she quickly heard a voice calling out through the door, “Oh, by the way, I have a hairbrush in the top drawer! I tried to grow my hair out to no avail, so there are some messed up prongs, but I hope it works!”

Through the door, she could smell the scent of wafting bacon.

Sure enough, when Pyrrha opened the top drawer, she could find the brush sitting there, almost covered in dust. It had clearly been a long time since it had been used, and she found that it was still in quite good order, tugging and teasing all the knots out of her hair with relative ease.

All in all, putting that thick, copper-red mane in appropriate order took the better part of fifteen minutes because she had to not only brush out all the tangles, but get clothed (including snagging her well-worn bra from the previous night). She then had to ventilate the room with an open door, an open shower window, and a running fan in order to remove enough humidity from the room in order to prevent her hair from poofing up like a particularly frustrating cloud.

What followed was another brushing of the hair, followed by binding it up into a very normal and relatively harmless-looking ponytail.

Any layman looking at the solid musculature of Pyrrha’s arms and neck (after all, that’s all the baggy t-shirt left without imagination) could tell that she had probably killed a man with that hair at some point or another.

Any person that had been present for even a portion of the events of the previous evening could tell you that she had come pretty damn close.

She tidied herself up a little more, then made her way out of the bathroom and towards the kitchen.

Sure enough, Jaune was wearing an apron that almost made Pyrrha double over in laughter the second she saw it.

The thing was hot pink, frilly, and read “I’m the cook. You know what to do.”

Jaune was clearly embarrassed by the prospect.

“It’s the only apron I have! And I don’t have so much food that requires grease in this house.”

Pyrrha immediately burst out laughing, almost doubled over. The only reason she wasn’t doubled over was because she leaned against the doorframe to support her, and didn’t even stop laughing then.

“What?!” Jaune asked defensively, planting his fists on his waist in frustration. Since one fist held a spatula and the other held an egg timer, this was a lot less intimidating than he would have liked.

Understandably, Pyrrha only laughed harder, and the fact that her mirth was at the ridiculousness of the whole situation (as was his intended point, unbeknownst to her) rather than him wearing what basically amounted to drag in the eyes of some fuckboi dudebros made him smile in return.

“Come on, Pyrrha. I’m making Eggs Benedict. The eggs need a little more time to poach, and the hollandaise needs to simmer, but it’s just about done otherwise.” He turned around and put four pieces of Canadian bacon on a plate separate from the rest of the stovetop. He’d cooked the Canadian bacon with jalapeño oil, so it would have a little bit of a kick to it, but the rest of breakfast was a straightforward.

Pyrrha peered at the clock on the stove and saw that it read half-past-ten.

“What time do you need to help your neighbor with her furniture?” Pyrrha asked, sauntering over to where he stood. The sway in her hips put Jaune a little bit off his groove (he was generally very on his groove when he was in the kitchen), and he barely managed to stammer out a response.

“I… uh… w-what?”

“What time do you need to help Ms. Sanders move her furniture?”

As if hit in the back of the throat with a gold brick wrapped around a slice of lemon, Jaune started, and stammered out another hoarse, confused response. “I said lunchtime, so noon-ish?”

“Good…” Pyrrha said, suddenly predatory. She moved towards him and placed a soft kiss on the underside of Jaune’s jawline. “Now which head does the cook wish me to kiss?” she asked teasingly.

“I… ah…” Jaune was melting with ecstasy the same way Pyrrha had been in the shower. “Do you not mind overdone eggs or… mnnn… burned hollandaise?”

“Not at all,” Pyrrha responded, tracing her fingers up his side and continuing to place warm and gentle kisses on his neckline, threatening to nibble at his collarbone.

“Then… the head you’re kissing isn’t the one that would appreciate it most…”

“Oh?” Pyrrha asked playfully, her hand moving to his crotch. A rather prominent tent already showcased itself there, and she found herself fumbling for the button of his shorts. Not a moment later, both his shorts and his underwear came free and produced an almost-red, pulsing organ.

The sight of it made Pyrrha’s heart skip a beat. Not because it was too large, or too girthy, or because it was curved in a particularly impressive way. Rather, Jaune’s member was just… average. Maybe a little above average, considering the reality of what other men had shown Pyrrha in the past.

The simple sight of his member prompted a reaction in her not unlike what happened in the shower. She grew rather wet and hoped that she wouldn’t be helping Jaune move Ms. Sanders’ furniture with a rather massive wet spot in the crotch of Jaune’s shorts.

They had to go.

Pyrrha stripped everything below the waist as she knelt and undid the laces at the back of Jaune’s apron, tugging it over his head and casting it aside. She wanted him to see everything she was doing, and she wanted him to enjoy every second of it.

She gently stroked Jaune’s length with a delicate, yet calloused touch and placed a quick layer of kisses on one side of it. Jaune watched her, his hand turning into a fist around the spatula while the other almost crushed the egg timer into shards of white plastic.

“I think this one likes me,” Pyrrha teased as she placed a kiss on the head of his cock, then slowly took it in her mouth to start sucking on it, bobbing her head towards his waist slowly. She pulled back, her eyes glancing up to see Jaune’s reaction.

He’d cast aside the egg timer and spatula into the sink so he could grip firmly onto the counter. He’d tilted his head back, but she could still see that his face was contorted in pleasure. It was a strange face for him to make, but Pyrrha found that she liked it a great deal.

She continued to pleasure him with her mouth, bobbing her head along his shaft and swirling her tongue around its entire length. He felt his member pulsing in excitement and ecstasy, already threatening to burst.

Apparently, she was able to feel it as well, because she pulled away and licked her lips with a smile. “Oh, Jaune… I don’t think I’m going to let you off that easy.”

“Could you do it anyway?” Jaune asked almost breathlessly. His grip on the counter had turned his knuckles white, and his hips had started to move involuntarily, as if he as trying to simulate the motion and finish himself off.

“Mmmm… Ask nicely,” Pyrrha teased, stroking him just enough to keep him on the brink, and that one action was enough to make him let out a sound that was halfway between a moan and a grumble.

“Please, could you let me get off?” Jaune said, his voice quaking, like he was on a rollercoaster stuck at the top of its first big drop.

“Alright, honey,” Pyrrha said as she took him in her mouth once again and continued to pleasure him, moving a little faster and rougher in order to help him over the edge this time.

Jaune came hard, thick ropes of his seed shooting onto the back of Pyrrha’s tongue. It tasted mostly bitter, very salty, but there was a hint of sweetness to it that Pyrrha didn’t mind. Of course, it wasn’t enough for her to swallow, so she pulled away after he finished and emptied the contents of her mouth into the sink, taking a brief moment to marvel at all of it before she washed it down the drain.

Bye-bye, little bastards.

Jaune, taking a turn to be weak in the knees, now, made his way over to the fridge with a slight stagger and a little stumble. He got two glasses down from one cupboard and poured two glasses of orange juice, bringing one to Pyrrha over at the sink.

She took it eagerly and drained half of the glass in order to wash the rest of the taste out of her mouth, and Jaune gave her a refill on the spot.

“That was lovely,” he said, leaning over and placing a quick kiss on her lips. He tried to ignore the fact that some of his semen could still be lingering on her lips, and instead tried to focus on the taste of her skin and on the orange juice that she had just drank.

She smiled and gave a little chuckle, saying, “I don’t think that ‘lovely’ is the word that most people would use for that.”

“Want me to find another? Fantastic? Mind-blowing? So good that I forgot what day of the week it was for a moment?”

Pyrrha gave another laugh, embracing him and kissing his neck. “I think ‘lovely’ will work just fine for now.”

Jaune held her there for a moment, enjoying the warm embrace before he started to sniff the air and realized that his hollandaise was still on the heat. “Shit,” He said, setting his orange juice down and moving as quickly as he could to salvage the sauce and eggs, setting up the most slapdash benedict he had ever made (not really a contest. He’d only made it three times before), and turning around with everything laid out on a pair of plastic plates. “I think I managed to save it.”

Pyrrha watched all of this with a sense of amusement. Only Jaune was the kind of dork that would worry about breakfast being burnt both before and after getting a blowjob. Pyrrha took one of the plates with a smile, snagged a fork and knife from a nearby drawer (she was lucky enough to get it right on the first try), and placed a quick kiss on his cheek before settling down at the kitchen table. Jaune took a seat across from her and she started to eat, letting out a pleased sound at the first bite.

“Jaune, this is so good! Where did you learn to cook?”

Jaune had started to dig in as well, and finished a bite of his meal before he responded, “My mother. She always got up early to make breakfast for everyone every morning. There would be some nights where I couldn’t sleep too well, so I would get up early to help. So… I only really know how to make breakfast reasonably well. I can do a pot roast if I have the time and ingredients, but it takes a while, so I don’t usually do that.”

Pyrrha nudged his foot with her own under the table, appreciating the silliness that was their current situation. They were taking care of their usual morning routines between sexual acts, resulting in their current situation of the two of them eating breakfast without anything on below the waist. 

This was a kind of life that Pyrrha could get used to. Unbeknownst to her, Jaune shared the same sentiment. This was the kind of domestic life that people didn’t show in TV shows because it was too sexually explicit, but it was the kind of life that some couples lived before they had children.

It seemed like the kind of domestic life that would be just right for Jaune and Pyrrha.

They finished up their meal and Jaune took the plates directly to the trash (they were some of the disposable ones that he had lingering around in the house), and immediately got to work on the dishes.

Pyrrha, not one to sit out on household chores, immediately grabbed a towel and started to dry things off, putting them away with the occasional question about where exactly they would need to go. Jaune was able to answer every question without even looking, since he had used pretty much everything in his kitchen at some point or another.

Granted, there wasn’t a lot that he needed to use. A couple of pots, two different sizes of frying pans, a couple spatulas, a pasta fork, slotted spoon. It was the bare essentials. No need for all the turnip twaddlers that dominated the kitchens of people that had been in some kind of kitchen salesperson profession.

In Jaune’s kitchen, there was no need for games of Dish Tetris, that practice of juggling a half dozen items with one hand while the other tried to put something into its exact place in order to ensure that everything would actually be able to fit appropriately.

Compared to the kitchen that Pyrrha had grown up with (her mother had been one of those aforementioned kitchenware salespeople), the practicality of Jaune’s kitchen was a welcome relief.

Once the last fork and knife were put away into their appropriate drawer, Pyrrha turned away and made a point to have Jaune take a nice long look at her particularly perfect posterior, her hips swaying slightly as she made her way back to the bedroom.

“We still have forty-five minutes before you need to go and help out Mrs. Sanders,” Pyrrha said, beckoning with a finger, “Care to make good use of that time?”

As if to entice him further, Pyrrha stripped out of the red shirt he’d loaned her and continued to make her way into the bedroom, letting the article of clothing fall, forgotten, and showcased the smooth skin and powerful muscles of her back.

Jaune was not long in following. Admittedly, he did have to fumble with the faucet in order to turn it off because the sight of Pyrrha in such a way was enough to distract any man and most women.

He immediately stripped out of his shirt and tossed it aside. He didn’t see that it landed quite perfectly on the kitchen table, so intent was he on following her into the bedroom.

Pyrrha had situated herself under the cover, and patted the spot next to her, beckoning him to come and join her.

She didn’t have to ask twice. He practically dove into bed, slipping underneath the covers and immediately placing a warm and playful kiss on Pyrrha’s lips. She melted into the gesture, her hands moving to his shoulders, being extra-careful with the previously injured joint, and he winced slightly even at her gentle touch, but didn’t stop her like he had last night. He would endure any amount of pain for this.

Luckily for him, he wouldn’t have to. He had popped several asprin before he got out of bed, so he could simply ignore the minimal aches that still lingered in his body.

Pyrrha continued to kiss him and felt his member pressing against her thigh not long afterwards, and immediately reached down to gently stroke his length in an attempt to coax it to full size.

Naturally, it worked. After all, how else is a horny man supposed to respond to the person he believes to be the most beautiful in the world? Compounded with the idea that they were both naked and they were completely aware of what was going to follow this tender, intimate moment, it wasn’t really hard for him to get… well, hard.

Pyrrha rolled him onto his back, taking care with his still-bound shoulder, and leaned down to kiss him as she straddled him. She sat up and the stray beams of sunlight wafting through the windows caught her hair in such a way that it managed to give her a halo of red-gold, like a goddess of war. Athena herself was grinding on Jaune’s cock, and he was more than willing to worship.

“I think I might be dreaming…” Jaune said, his voice soft and more than a little bit shaky.

“A dream you’ve had before?” Pyrrha teased, her voice slightly twisted by the pleasure of them teasing each other.

“A couple dozen times, yeah,” Jaune confirmed, and Pyrrha let out a laugh that devolved into a squeaking moan. She covered her mouth and Jaune sat up to take her hand and lace his fingers with it. “I have rubbers in the nightstand,” he said as he jerked his head in the general direction of the one on Pyrrha’s side of the bed.

Pyrrha responded with a quiet “Mmmm…” and reached over, pulling open the top drawer and removing an unopened box of Trojans with a raised eyebrow. She glanced over at Jaune with an expression that seemed to ask a very poignant question.

He responded in the only way he could: Exasperation and mild embarrassment. “It’s been a while.”

“Well,” Pyrrha said seductively, opening he plastic seal with a fingernail and withdrawing one of the strips, “If I have my way, we’re going to get through the box by the end of the week.

That was a prospect that made Jaune’s member pulse with excitement, and he had to resist the urge to say “Down, boy, this is serious.”

Pyrrha opened up the packaging and moved away from his hips, putting the condom in her mouth and moving her head down to his groin where she expertly slipped the condom onto his member with her lips.

Jaune had to resist the urge to blow his load right then and there.

“How… uh… how long did you have to practice to do that?” Jaune asked, his voice slightly shaky. Pyrrha let out a laugh like chimes.

“A week, a couple of boxes, and a lot of lubricant-scented bananas the next morning,” she said, and Jaune found himself laughing.

There is an old phrase: If you can’t laugh with the person that you’re having sex with while you’re having sex with them, then y’all shouldn’t be fucking in the first place.

It’s not that old, but still illustrates how a healthy relationship should work.

Pyrrha straddled Jaune again, lowering herself down onto his length bit by bit, having to adjust her aim every now and then in order to make sure that he slipped in fully, and paused twice because she had to get used to his size.

“Christ, you’re big…” she murmured, her breath already heavy.

“If you want, I can be on top,” Jaune offered, hoping that it would be a bit more comfortable for her.

“N-no…” she said, shaky in the face of a challenge for the first time that Jaune had ever heard, “I can… handle it!”

She dropped her hips and enveloped his cock in one smooth stroke, though she noticeably quaked afterwards. Jaune only stared on in awe as she breathed heavily and let out a shuddering sigh before placing her hand on his chest.

“I want you to enjoy the view…” she said as she began to move, rocking her hips back and forth on top of him and letting out a few moans that were stifled by her biting her lip. “I want you to… to… ahhn… see everything…”

Well, considering the fact that she was capable of pinning him down (if she wasn’t already), and the fact that the view was quite nice indeed, Jaune wasn’t about to offer any complaints.

He pressed his hips up into hers and gave her a reason to let go of her lower lip, to squeak out a short cry before she began riding him in earnest. Her firm, full breasts bounced and the mane of waves that was her ponytail threatened to ride up and cover her shoulders with each motion.

Jaune was so entranced by the sights that he barely heard the sounds that were coming out of Pyrrha’s mouth, getting louder and louder in volume while she rode him. In Pyrrha’s mind, this was the fulfillment of a yearlong fantasy, one that she had busted out her high-tech collection of toys to on multiple occasions.

In Jaune’s mind, he felt like she was doing all the work.

He leaned up (the hand pressing down on his chest had weakened considerably since she had started riding him), and pressed his lips to hers.

She let out a long, slow moan against his mouth and moved her hands up to drape over his shoulders.

“Let me join in on the fun as well…” he whispered into her ear, and he felt her nethers twitch as she let out a soft moan at the statement.

He maneuvered her so she was on her side and he was kneeling, spreading her legs and thrusting into her while her calf rested against his chest. If she so desired, she could twist her ankle and smack him in the head with her foot, but it mainly hung limp as he began to do his part.

She moaned, whimpered, her hands scrabbling for the bedsheets before finding purchase, and she barely had time to whine out his name before she grabbed a pillow and covered her face with it to let out a muffled scream as her legs tensed and her abdomen twitched.

Jaune paused, equal parts amused, perturbed, and aroused by the very… physical orgasm.

When Pyrrha had finally settled down, she murmured, “Sorry… that was really immodest of me.”

Jaune raised an eyebrow and gestured at the position the two of them were in: Both naked on his bed, with him balls deep inside her. “Really, Pyrrha? You think this is the time to talk modesty?”

Despite herself, Pyrrha began laughing, covering her mouth, and Jaune joined her, letting her leg down so he could lean in and give her another kiss. She giggled against his lips and wondered how she could have gotten so lucky even as he slid his member into her while she was fully on her back.

Her back arched, her lips parted, and she found herself unable to cover her mouth as she let out a rather loud moan. “You… bastard,” she said playfully, “I’m still sensitive.”

Jaune, cockier now that he had evened the score (she had scored the first point in the kitchen), responded “Well, that’ll make this even more interesting then.

He fucked her. He rode her like a wild horse and she found herself practically screaming in pleasure as he slid in and out of her. For a second, she wondered if this was all him, or if the condom was just ribbed for her pleasure.

After a moment, she decided that she didn’t care.

Jaune, however, was doing everything that he could in order to hold on, to cling onto that little bit of sanity that he had left before completely blowing it and losing all stamina that he would have for this sort of activity for the next… fifteen minutes, he supposed.

He hadn’t bothered to count during the last time he surfed porn.

A few thrusts later, Pyrrha began to scream his name in ecstasy, her voice hiking as she practically whimpered his name and tried to say something before she started to twitch again. Those perfectly-sculpted abs pulsed in a tantalizing manner, and her legs wrapped around his back, pinning him into her while her hands moved to pull him in for one more kiss.

She came, her walls tightening around him and seeming to knead every little bit of himself that he had out of her. She moaned into the kiss, and it was only slightly dampened by the contact.

That last bit, her kiss, made him climax as well. He came so hard that he felt like he was going to punch a hole in the condom, even as he pushed himself as deep as he could into her, almost as if by instinct.

They held the position for a few seconds before pulling apart, both of them flopping onto their sides so they could stare the other in the eye.

“Glad you came to the metal concert last night?” Pyrrha asked teasingly, and Jaune could only offer the sexual equivalent of a death rattle in response.

A giggle, then, “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’”

“Yeah… if I get my way, we’re going to use up that box by the end of the day,” Jaune said, having found his voice after a bit.

“Ohhhh,” Pyrrha said with a chuckle, “So eager? But are you sure you have the stamina for it? You sounded like I just sucked the soul out of you.”

“I think you did.”

Pyrrha kissed him again and asked, “How long do you think before you’ll be ready for another round?”

“Jesus Christ, woman, you’re insatiable,” Jaune said semi-mockingly. Though he had the distinct feeling that this was a lot of pent-up feelings coming to the forefront on her side of the equation.

“Mmm…” Pyrrha practically purred, running a finger down the center of his chest, “When presented with this, how could I not be?”

Jaune responded in kind, “When presented with that,” he said, gesturing at her entire body, “It’s a surprise that I’m not ready to go again already!”

“Could be worse,” Pyrrha said with a shrug, “You could be done for the day.”

“Yeah, that’s not up my alley at all,” he responded as he sat up and took the condom off, pitching it into the trash can by his nightstand… first time he’d used that in a while.

The trash can, mind. Not the condom. Though both were true.

“So what now?” Pyrrha asked, sitting up and staring at her… lover? No. Boyfriend. He was her boyfriend.

“Well, give me a couple of minutes to…” his phone beeped the opening tune to _Neon Genesis Evangeleon_ , “Fuck.”

“Well, we just took a couple of minutes to do that,” Pyrrha said as Jaune grabbed his phone.

“No, I overestimated how much time we have,” Jaune said as he held up the phone that showcased an alarm for ten minutes.

“Wait, what?!” Pyrrha said as she practically leapt out of bed.

“We have to be over at Mrs. Sanders’ place in ten minutes,” Jaune said as he stood up and started to usher her towards the bathroom.

“Another shower? We don’t have time for that!”

“It’s a rinse, just to get the sex stink off us. Mrs. Sanders has four kids, she will know what happened.”

“Well…” Pyrrha said, trying to adapt to the situation, “We should shower together to save time and water.”

“Yes, yes, of course, just turn the damn thing on!”

Despite Pyrrha’s flirtations, they were out the door ten minutes later.


End file.
